Twitter was supposed to die a messy death some weeks ago, as the rather combative management approach of Elon Musk took its required level of sacrifices.
It has survived its own new owner, for the moment at least, but using Twitter for communications and marketing remains a judgement call. At its best, it can still connect with influential figures in any industry and give your organisation a profile with stakeholders, agents, journalists and even parents. But the demographics of the platform might mean you need to go elsewhere to put yourself in front of students and Generation Z.
Should you stay on Twitter?
And we’ve discussed elsewhere why Twitter is worth persevering with - but the main reason for staying is the same as why you went on there in the first place. To influence the way people think about you, to be a presence in people’s timelines so that, at the point of purchase, you are in the forefront of their minds. You can still connect with people who can help you, with news and information which can tweak your strategies and take part on a platform where the ability to affect things is way disproportionate to the number of users it has.
Is Mastodon the alternative?
There is, currently, a related question - should you jump to a new platform? Now, this has echoes of the brief debate on whether we should all head over to Clubhouse (which is a question no-one asks anymore), but there’s still a healthy level of debate.
The current choice of Twitter refugees is Mastodon. Now, you may, or may not have heard of it. It’s been around for a while (originally launched in 2016), but having spent years as a more geeky space and a haven from the bigger crowds, it is suddenly the home for people looking for a less combative space than Twitter.
Although, ironically, that has annoyed some of the Mastodon old-timers who, understandably, don’t want to import the more toxic elements of the Musk empire, as well as causing some capacity issues.
And it’s a very different space to what you might be used to - it’s a federated network - effectively of thousands of mini-networks, run on servers around the planet, but connected by the Mastodon technology in what is known as the ‘fediverse.’
The word ‘fediverse’ is not the only slightly annoying terminology - ‘toots’ (posts/tweets) is pretty bad too, but at least those posts are longer than their Twitter equivalents. And finding the people and the topics you used to know over there is harder too. Or, at least, different.
It is, after all, a different platform. Back in the Old Times when social media platforms were popping up, they all seemed strange. All the conversations were about how weird these new habits were that we were supposed to adopt - about ‘poking’ on Facebook or complaining about people who put up pictures of their breakfast online (yet no-one seemed to see those pictures).
Mastodon is at that similar ‘foreign’ stage.
So should you be on Mastodon?
Right now, a majority verdict might be that Mastodon is not the answer to your social media marketing woes. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be there. People in marketing and comms have got out of the habit of trying new spaces.
TikTok aside, there hasn’t been the experimentation that there seemed to be when people were jumping from SecondLife to Bebo and from Pinterest to Tumblr. Trying new platforms is healthy in itself - making you and your team think a little differently about content, presentation and ideas.
Get in there and monitor the platform and understand it, and you may work out some potential uses - and, if there comes a moment when your brand is being discussed on there, then you are present and ready. You can connect to those in your industry who have already made the move. Being there means you have secured your brandname/username, or at least established yourself (it’s not quite the same since you can only really secure it on one server).
But the numbers on Mastodon, while growing rapidly, are still not big. And they may not be the ones you want - and even if they were, its so decentralised, they are hard to find. And yet…
There’s lots of things about Mastodon which (deliberately) make it difficult for brands and ad-spend is pretty much impossible. But if Twitter slides off the edge of the precipice and falls into the hellhole it has threatened to become, or if Musk sacks so many people, it simply collapses, then a Plan B, however imperfect, is useful.
Social platforms which survive have a habit of pivoting to their users’ needs and those already on there have a first-mover advantage. The new dinosaur of Mastodon is unlikely to be the post-Twitter future for your marketing, but it might be a haven for a while while you regroup to jump onto the Next Big Thing.
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