Will you need to be a librarian to find the new Twitter in Google?
CILIP, the library and information association
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Twitter’s billionaire CEO owner doesn’t take many things so seriously, so its no surprise he didn’t take searchability into account when he decided to rebrand the social media platform as the letter ‘X’.
Musk’s ‘X’ rebrand of Twitter has already fallen foul of one of the classic pitfalls in branding, failing to think about searchability
Currently a google search for X sets the social network up against several films, a movie production company, a technology company, and a rock band from the USA, and that’s just the first page of results.
A brand named ‘X’ will also cause problems when searching documents, files and databases.
A search for the letter X will bring up every word containing it – let us hope you’re not interested in how Twitter discusses xylophones or X-rays.
You can add in white space characters either side to improve matters, but does everyone really have to become an expert in regular expression searching because the CEO fancies a change of logo?
Twitter has traditionally been a place of networking, campaigning, and sharing news
Particularly useful during lockdowns, Twitter allowed librarians to stay in touch with their patrons, and make a name for their libraries through the platform, see Orkney Library as an example.
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Twitter also helped raise the profile
This rebrand marks another top-down decision
A possible solution to the searchability issue would be to incorporate the .com
Apparently, tweets will now become ‘Xs’. But will they really?
Those of us who are still struggling with the rebranding of Opal Fruits to Starburst will know how difficult it is to force a change in an iconic brand.
Dr Beth Montague-Hellen can be found on X as @Phdgeek, on Mastodon as @DrBeth@ glammr.us and on Bluesky as @drbeth.bsky.social