What Content Marketing Professionals Can Learn From The Chaos At X

It’s hard not to feel a bit sorry for Linda Yaccarino, the new CEO of X (a.ka. the Network Formerly Known as Twitter)

She’s been trying to draw on her background as an advertising executive at NBC by commissioning TV-style content for X, in an attempt to win back advertisers who have been driven away by Elon Musk’s offensive tweets (are we still calling them tweets?)

Yaccarino hopes to kick off 2024 with new, native streaming shows, hosted by people such as Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic presidential candidate, and Don Lemon, the former CNN anchor who left the network in the aftermath of a report alleging he had mocked and bullied his female co-workers.

This new lineup of television personalities comes in the wake of former Fox News anchor (and sometime Trump cheerleader) Tucker Carlson trying to launch his own streaming show on X. Carlson’s content experiment on X was a resounding failure - he has since launched his own subscription network and will charge his subscribers $9 for the privilege.

It’s hard to see how Yaccarino’s attempts to attract well known television personalities to X are going to work, especially with Musk’s outspoken opinions continuing to cause instability and jeopardising prospective advertiser revenue further.

But Yaccarino’s strategy seemed to bear fruit earlier this week, when YouTube sensation MrBeast, shared his first video directly to X. MrBeast (real name Jimmy Donaldson) claimed he was testing the new ad-revenue sharing system that Musk set up last year.

Maybe this is marks a reversal in the fortunes of X, a social media network that has been mired in chaos since Musk acquired it in the final quarter of 2022.

Whatever happens next, there are certainly lessons that content creators and content managers can learn from this chaos. In this week’s edition, I thought I’d share some of these lessons in more detail.

Lesson 1: Your content won’t work without good positioning

Yaccarino’s media strategy for X seems very muddled. On the one hand, she seems to be harbouring ambitions to turn X into an online television channel. But will X host its own, exclusive content? Or will creators and influencers like MrBeast retain the freedom to post their viral content on YouTube as well?

This begs the question: what is X? Is it an owned media platform, or is it going to continue to serve as a social media channel for other brands’ content?

X now has a positioning problem. It’s no longer clear what’s unique or valuable about it as a brand. Musk is slowly stripping out the old Twitter brand. The platform’s identity as a micro-blogging site, wherein all posts were limited to 280 characters, seems to be long gone.

Musk has made clear his ambitions to turn X into the ‘everything app’. At a company all-hands a few months ago, he was quoted as saying

“We’re rapidly transforming the company from what it was, Twitter 1.0, to the everything app. [An] all-inclusive feature set that you can basically do anything you want on our system. Obviously, that’s not to the exclusion of other apps, but I think the fundamental thing that’s missing that would be incredibly useful is a single application that encompasses everything. You can do payments, messages, video, calling, whatever you’d like, from one single, convenient place.”

It’s a great ambition, but there are already a number of tech companies offering these services. You may have heard of them - they go by the names ‘Google’ and ‘Apple’. Offering users the opportunity to do things “from one convenient place” has to be the most over-used product marketing catchphrase on the planet.

X seems to be betting the house, at least in part, on a new owned content strategy. Yet it’s a strategy that lacks coherence. In fact it’s barely a strategy at all.

It’s easy to launch a new content strategy. But if you haven’t done the hard work of positioning your brand or your product, then your content strategy won’t be positioned to deliver results.

Lesson 2: Follow your audience, not your C-suite

What’s striking about these new content initiatives at X is they seem to be the brainchild of Musk and Yaccarino themselves. Musk seems intent on giving his customers an ‘everything app’, whether his customers like it or not.

Likewise, the rollout of ‘Twitter Blue’, X’s premium offering for users, has been met with heavy criticism.

It’s not clear to what extent X’s new content strategy has been informed by extensive audience research. Indeed, in the year since Musk took over, many of Twitter’s users have fled to alternative social media providers that mirror the UX of the old Twitter interface, such as BlueSky and Threads. -0

Lesson 3: X is rented land with no clear value

The lack of positioning and audience awareness poses a problem for content marketers seeking to use X in the future: the constant chaos that has become a defining feature of Musk’s tenure makes it difficult for brands to plan any coherent social media strategy.

The old axiom of content marketing “don’t build your content on rented land” has never seemed more relevant.

It’s less clear how X can be used as part of a wider omni-channel social media strategy. Will it be the platform of long-form video content, or will it continue to be a network where metrics are defined by likes and reposts?

And in Musk’s new world of advertiser revenue sharing, how many business brands will want to invest their marketing and content budget in a platform with no clear differentiating value?