Anura PR Team
Twitter is undergoing a total rebrand. The bird named “Larry” has flown the nest and now Twitter has a new logo “X.” While we don’t hate the new logo, and it’s on brand with the rest of Elon Musk’s companies, changing the logo isn’t going to fix Musk’s problems with Twitter.
Why is Elon Musk rebranding Twitter?
Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion in October of 2022 after a small court battle with the board of Twitter over the purchase price of the social media platform. The pause and battle were due to Musk's awareness of fake accounts that run rampant on Twitter.
After years of trying to gain traction in the social media industry, Twitter is now battling a bad reputation for being riddled with ad fraud. As a result, businesses are slowly backing away from the platform.
Twitter depends on advertising revenue and Musk 's attempt to rebrand Twitter will hopefully regain advertiser support. However, as we know a tiger doesn’t change their stripes.
How Bad is Twitter’s Ad Fraud?
Sparktoro conducted an analysis in 2022 that showed over 19 percent spam or fake accounts out of almost 45,000 active profiles. This statistic is vastly different than Musk’s report of 5 percent fraud taken from a sample size of 100 users proving that bots have a massive impact on social media.
How Do Bots Hurt Social Media?
Bots hurt social media platforms in many ways. Social media is intended to be a forum for social interactions between actual people. Fake followers and bots result in a lack of human connection that impacts businesses as well.
Bots can hurt social media by:
Misrepresenting Company social media performance and subscribers
In the social media world, the number of subscribers or followers an account has impacts its content's audience. If a company has too many bot followers, their content may not be selected when search engines recommend new content to users or the wrong users will be selected to view content. This can decimate a company’s performance on social media and lead to loss of sales.
Draining advertising budgets
Bots can click on ads, draining a company’s social media advertising budget. Since these bots can’t convert into customers, companies may be left with no advertising budget and no ROI to show for it.
Destroying engagement quality of posts
Bots typically only view and “like” posts. Even the best bots don’t generate the high quality responses needed to reflect engagement on social media. Without high-quality engagement, platforms assume the content created isn’t of high-quality.
Bots share misleading or false information which hurts a company’s reputation
Although real humans often share false information without realizing it, many times they see this information because a bot shared it first. Social media bots can leave negative reviews and comments on company posts ruining a brand’s reputation in the process.
Related Blog: How Social Bots Can Hurt Your Company
Has Twitter Gotten Worse?
Musk's plan is to improve Twitter and reduce bot traffic. Since his takeover, users are battling bots and scams worse than ever before.
Musk released Twitter Blue, a subscription service that allows users to pay $8 per month for a blue verified checkmark, without Twitter verifying the user's identity. Companies have been impersonated by fraudsters who have purchased the checkmark and then posted as the company.
In the past, users were able to trust companies and personalities that display a verified check mark indicating they have proved to the platform that they are real people and are who they claim to be. Since the subscription cost is so low, most fraudsters have no issue making this purchase to damage the reputation of their targets. This practice has resulted in damaging effects for many companies, such as Nintendo.
How could Twitter stop the bots?
If Twitter truly wanted to stop their bot problem without having an expensive rebrand, they could use an ad fraud detection solution. By using a solution that analyzes traffic in real time to accurately identify fraud, Twitter could eliminate their bot and human fraud problem for good.
By using Anura’s ad fraud solution with No False PositivesTM, companies can be protected from all forms of ad fraud, save their marketing budget, and reduce stress levels that accompanies an entire rebrand.
