According to a Reuters report, apart from celebrities and world-famous influencers, many “heavy users” are ghosting their accounts on Twitter. As a result, Twitter marketing might take a hit as the platform is losing its active users on a daily basis.

Twitter is one of the major social media platforms that most brands use to promote their products or services. As we mentioned before, a lot of the revenue comes from its active users who are extremely crucial for the business, keeping people engaged.

These “heavy tweeters” accounts for less than 10% of monthly users, but they generate 90% of the tweets, fortifying half of the overall revenue for the platform.

Who are “Heavy Tweeters”?

A “heavy tweeter” is someone who is most active on Twitter, logging in more than six days a week. These users generally tweet about three to four times a week. Since the pandemic, there has been a global decline among these tweeters, leading to the platform losing its overall revenue.

How Twitter content boosts social media strategy?

Brands do recognize Twitter as an integral part of their social media strategy. According to Twitter business reports, people spend 26% more time viewing ads on Twitter than on any other social media platform.

Twitter marketing helps brands to:
• Build awareness and promotes products
• Drives more engagement through active tweeters
• Build a strong community of loyal followers
• Drives purchases

Twitter helps brands like us to provide two very distinctive avenues for social media marketing through content—organic social media marketing and paid social media promotions.

Organic social media promotions happen with elements like Twitter Threads, Video Summaries, Twitter Chat, etc. This type of content really helps brands to get audience engagement. For example, a Twitter thread can be on a recent topic which generates more comments, thus more buzz regarding the topic. As a brand, you can use this buzz to promote your services or products and encourage people to visit your website.

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Meanwhile, you can do paid advertising on Twitter with images, videos, or carousel ads. In fact, the social media platform has a Quick Promote tool that marketers can easily use for text, image, or video content. This tool is simple and quite affordable, helping small businesses to gain social media traffic for their brand.

Possible Reasons for The Decline in Heavy Users

Change In the Dynamic of English Speakers

Twitter is predominantly an English-based social media platform. It makes most of its revenue through English speakers.

The platform earns more ad revenues from the United States alone than any other part of the world. Now, a fascinating trend has been observed by the authorities. Most English-speaking Twitter users have changed their interests.

Newer, preferably more video-based social media platforms like TikTok are making a buzz in the market. Along with this, Instagram is also introducing quite a few features that align with the English-speaking crowds. This might make the site less appealing to marketers.

Along with this, for most English-speaking heavy users the growing interest is in cryptocurrency and NSFW (not safe for work) content, that involves nudity and pornography.

Dwindling Interest in Generic Topics

One of the main issues that people have with Twitter is that it’s a platform with the most talks about sports, news, scandals, and politics. On one hand, those topics are perfect for social media content that suffice for advertisers and strategists.

However, nowadays, most users are inclined toward niche content. Even with entertainment, people like to choose what they want to see.

The ‘Elon Musk’ Effect

After Elon Musk took the acquisition of the popular social media platform, hundreds of Twitter users deactivated their accounts, causing major stars like Katy Perry and Barack Obama to lose massive numbers of followers.

According to news reports, many celebrities took issues over the new owner’s stance on misinformation and hate speech. This led to many of them quitting the platform. Musk also tweeted his plans on lifting permanent bans on users and about his plans for a content moderation council with diverse viewpoints. This also didn’t sit well with many active users on the platform.

The Issues with Bots

Another major problem with Twitter is bots. A bot is a software program that sends out automated posts on Twitter. Sometimes, these bots are easily identifiable. These bots even reply to messages.

Now, as a business, we can never oppose the use of bots. Chatbots are extremely helpful for business objectives, however, when you try to replace creative posts with automated posts—it can surely harm the interest of the users. Bots have also started to impact Twitter experiences negatively regarding misinformation.

Does It Affect Social Media Traffic?

Although it might seem that the decline in active users would only affect Twitter marketing, the real issue is with all social media platforms and organic traffic.

For some years, every social media platform is struggling to maintain users’ interest, offering innovative features to gain a competitive advantage in the market. This means platforms are quickly developing countermoves offering more and more technical features.

For instance, Twitter and Spotify started live chat space with LinkedIn soon offering their version of the platform. Again, Twitter introduced Twitter Fleets in 2020 as a countermove against Instagram Stories. But sometimes these countermoves can backfire. Twitter Fleets was discontinued in 2021, less than a year since its introduction.

Why? This is because when you introduce a new change in the market, you need to give time and space for marketers to plan out the use of that feature properly. Otherwise, it creates an oversaturation of content, which affects a brand negatively.

Moreover, with so many video and live platforms, adding the same old feature to all social media platforms cannot help to retain the audience’s interest.

Twitter is one of the most liberal social media out there. Not to sound political, but 65% of Twitter users identify themselves with more liberal thoughts. In fact, when Donald Trump was banned from Twitter in 2021, the platform saw a sudden jump in its user base. Now, with Elon Musk’s plan on removing bans permanently, most liberal users are deactivating their accounts, affecting the traffic of the site.

Though Twitter marketing is taking a hit due to diminishing active users, ads on Twitter are still a great viable option for social media strategy. Twitter is a great way to drive traffic to your blog, websites, promotional link, etc. Our research at Brainium shows people spend more time seeing ads on Twitter than on any other social media accounts.

Concluding Thoughts

To effectively use Twitter and see the return on your investment, the key is to understand that the network generally works for long-term gain. So, even if there is a decline in active users and your brand might not get the traffic it used to for some time, deploying a customized social media plan would work for you in the long run.

Additionally, mentions also improve your chances of engaging your target audiences. Now, this could also imply the fact that many people aren’t fully aware when consuming these ads. Interesting thought to test with us in your next Twitter marketing campaign.