Twitter is going one of two ways. Either Elon Musk is going to burn the entire thing down swiftly in a fit of pique, or it will go the way of Tumblr: become a wholly unprofitable, entirely unmarketable, good, honest shitposting platform. At the same time, whatever direction Meta is going in… doesn’t have legs.
Going down with it will be entire industries of marketing grifts. Those listening tools. Those automated tone detectors. The lucrative doohickeys for identifying microinfluencers. The five-year engagement strategies and the ebooks and the webinars, all of them entirely irrelevant. Elon Musk isn’t the only one who is going to lose a lot of money.
I posted this on Twitter, but since there’s a decent chance I won’t be able to repost my tweet when the time comes to declare I’m right, I’m going to say my prediction here:
We are about a year out from the marketing industry declaring the death of social media marketing.
It’s an industry entirely formed on lines going up on made-up metrics and those lines are going to go down. They could introspect and identify that perhaps their entire shtick was built on some things they made up and told each other and amplified. But no, it’s the children who are wrong.
Where the grift shifts, I don’t know. It’s true that their entire pseudoscientific theory base and measures and methods will collapse. So to them, social media marketing is dead. And they’ll have to create something else in its place.
But it isn’t, not really. It becomes a space where the individuals with their etsy shops can thrive, free from the colossal forces of the algorithm-gaming industries. And I think that’s the best outcome all round.
Also, we can all enjoy some good, honest shitposting.
_
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Another angry woman 