The RMR crew already had a few run-ins with the folks over at Twitter. But it was mostly about minor stuff. Concerns about the makeup of their website, the Dorsey-man’s frightening gobbledygook and what have you. But by and large, the site worked well at a reasonably reliable level and sported a stout following of the rock and metal community. And that’s also the only reason why the RMR Social Media folks even bothered with a heavily censured, low-value messaging app mainly populated by elitists, politicians, colorful celebrities, miscellaneous artists, and misguided government bodies.
I guess, the most intriguing slice of Twitter users truly are organizations in charge of critical security infrastructure. Police forces, disaster prevention, fire departments, humanitarian networks, and so on allegedly rely (or relied) on services like Twitter to keep their populace informed about threats. In other words, some of them at least put all their trust in a public company for critical messaging to said populace they’re charged to protect. A company that has been creaking around the edges with financial woes and other uncertainties for a long while. And also one that reaches only a limited part of the people said organizations actually should be able to connect with.
Thus, using Twitter for vital communication is such an amazingly stupid idea in so many ways, it truly boggles the mind. Twitter may be useful for gentle messages about vague threats lurking in the offing somewhere to the ever-limited slice of ‘we the people’ happy to use it still. But once the rubber really hits the road, this is a woefully inadequate approach. Because the first services to disappear in a real crisis are those unhardened wireless networks scattered about the countryside. And you’ll be left with nothing. Unless, you get Musk’s Starlink, perhaps?
So, in comes Twitter’s newest poster boy, the Chief Twit.1 Famous sink-slinger Elon Musk emerged from his space explorations and bought himself the creaking Twitter at an amazingly over-priced rate – some 44 billion USD total – that knocked him off the rich-guy-scale big time. Long story short, he finally had to honor the first overpriced offering after all his attempts to ‘play the market’ and get off with a better deal didn’t work. So, with that done and over with, Musk here took the company private, allowed ‘free speech’, and fired 2/3 of Twitter’s workforce. Which increased the creaking even more. Take that, you critical security wackos.
After letting hate messaging – orange or brown, take your pick – back into the fold, advertisers jumped ship. Which, yet again, increased the creaking even more. Because – you see – Twitter just singlehandedly managed to strangle their intake of ad money. And who can blame the advertisers? No proud brand wants to be associated with general hate speech, Nazi paraphernalia, and blatant support of conspiracy theories.
So, Musk’s much-diminished brain pool had the brilliant idea to make people pay for their verified checkmarks and to limit non-paid accounts even more. That – obviously – didn’t sit too well with those celebrities who had to put in real work to get those checkmarks to protect their livelihoods. Because right now, you and I can just go ahead, pay 8 bucks a month and get one. Imagine the potential for mischief.
And what are all those outstanding perks a membership will buy me? Not a lot. Pretty much anything can be had for free when you move over to good ol’ Facebook, for instance. The most unfortunate one probably is that you get to see – only 50% of the ads. Or that Twitter Blue users will be able to write tweets up to 25K characters long. Or – again – that you can get SMS two-factor authentication, which is – come to think of it – not the smartest of all solutions available. Duh? And why are those damn gods laughing again?
So, as you might imagine, all of those shenanigans didn’t really alleviate our fears of losing some SEO ranking points over this. Because our musky dude here doesn’t really add anything of value to his limited service, apart from paying for something we never asked for nor wanted. Now, to top it, the latest part of the saga is rate-limiting Twitter users (see attached Twitter post). And the reason is extensive data scraping by bots like ChatGPT. Or is it system manipulation, which is – come to think of it – much, much worse. What exactly would you like to tell us, Elon?
So wow, Twitter limits access to the service for its users because – the company cannot handle bots. Come again? That’s akin to sinking your own ship with all hands to deter the pirates from attacking you. I am speechless but – at the same time – strangely unsurprised. Usually, you will want your flesh-and-blood users have all the access they never need. Scroll to their heart’s content, click on stuff – preferably on ads. Write many tweets that will make other users click on them. A wet dream for any SEO manager, right? And you absolutely don’t EVER curtail access to content creators. It’s them who bring you – the social media company – free clicks and traffic.
On the contrary, controlling your website traffic by blocking out useless bots that won’t heed simple rules – legal or otherwise – is something your engineers usually do. To add insult to injury, our Social Media Management Platform informs us that the Twitter API won’t allow for certain critical functionalities anymore. Reasons yet unknown, but we just reckon it’s blatant lack of manpower. After all, if you fire your technically savvy staff, unsavory things happen.
So, RMR finds itself in a pickle. Here we are with Twitter, a service that was strangely benign before, if not a bit odd at times. But then, listening to Dorsey for 20 seconds straight will make you feel all woozy, so who are we kidding? Yet today, we have the remnants of the service run by Darth Vader of the tech universe. The universal genius who’s such an atrocious manager that any of those videos I see of him playing Da Boss just make me want to call the cringe police. Companies run with the Apartheid gene never get on my good side. And I’m not even a soft-bellied leftie, so I wonder why that is.
So, what about Twitter as a threat to our SEO scores? It’s simple. If the company wishes to continue on that slippery road of theirs, it’s not gonna end well. Why would people pay for a service I can pretty much have for free elsewhere? Only if there is mind-blowing innovation over at the Twitter office, of course. Ideas that only in-house genius Musk can come up with. Right? Well, we have seen none, so that dog won’t hunt.
In the immediate, there’s no threat. The FTC investigation into Twitter’s privacy practices has not yet returned results. The liberal watchdogs haven’t yet declared the service an outcast, thus turning using Twitter into a problem. No investigative journalist took the platform to task over their sometimes doubtful practices. And that’s unlikely, as most of the news people seem to think that Twitter is the fucking messiah of social media. And then they go ahead and babble endlessly about Musk and his bad deeds. But hey, nobody ever said there needed to be some logic there.
As to RMR, there’s a dwindling interest to continue feeding the hungry cakeholes of the Twitter sales staff with free content, so they can profit from it. And we only do that to service the rock and metal community still active at the musky watering holes. At the same time, we’ll be opening new prospects over at Threads and Mastodon. The Zuckerman is still the better of two really bad options and the weird federated social media may truly become an opportunity. And with that, Twitter can shipwreck on the next blackened riff for all we care – or continue to painfully rumble along their chosen pathway. We’ll be ready.
Ed’s note: If you’d like more of that, here’s to the 2nd rant. And there won’t be more, we promise. Snazzy music awaits.
The Odd Footnote!- I kid you not, that what he calls himself.-↩