Little bird, big hassle?

With all the news this week from the increasingly wild world of micro-blogging (Bluesky adding a million users overnight, Threads having more users now than after its post-launch peak), it feels like a good time to ask what your plans are for X-Twitter branding across your products and content.

At Teach First we decided to pause replacing old Twitter branding late last year. Swapping out a bird logo in a website footer might not cost much, but it has to be worth it nonetheless. We’re holding off until it’s clearer that X branding will last. In fact, we have a specific indicator in mind (more on that below).

Why? Few reasons:

Google Trends comparisons suggest that people just aren’t using X brand terminology much, while Twitter terminology is still going strong.

News outlets still use the old name and brand terminology, sometimes alongside the new. We’re now six months out from the rebrand and I still can’t find any news that just refers to “X”.

Larger organisations haven’t yet replaced the bird logo on their sites/apps. This includes Macmillan, the National Trust, even BBC News.

It’s hard not to associate X branding more closely with the network’s owner than with the network itself. And, well - let’s just say you might want to think twice before hitching your brand to that particular not-really-self-driving vehicle.

But the biggest reason of all? The network’s own web domain still hasn’t changed from “twitter.com”. At the moment “x.com” post URLs just redirect to the old ones. So that’s the indicator we’re waiting for – when X-Twitter switches domains and demonstrates full investment in its new branding, we will too.

Maybe it’s just a matter of time before they make the change, maybe they’ve been hard at work on it from the time the new owner took over. But regardless of their efforts, Twitter branding still retains a lot of cachet today, so anyone who might be suitably empowered (say, a new owner) could decide to bring back the bird and capitalise on an avalanche of people returning to the platform. It could end up being a “Classic Coke” case study for the social media era.