Digital media budgets for almost all companies are essentially put into three buckets (larger companies might have a local publisher/programmatic/digital TV bucket as well).
1. Google Search
2. Meta/YouTube (maybe TikTok)
3. Other platforms/bets
Bucket three is basically all of Reddit/Snap/X/Pinterest/LinkedIn etc., they are all sub scale, and they all perform worse than the other platforms in almost every single niche. None of them work particularly well, everyone knows they don't work super well, but we all keep throwing a few dollars their way because the idea of business performance being at the whim of two companies is frightening. They're all fighting over scraps though.
I'm probably being a little hyperbolic, but probably not by much.
Membership is a hook -- once you have a member, they're more likely to buy from you. It's not really a marketing channel, per se, but it is a method of increasing sales.
"Marketing" gets kind of murky at the edges, really. Consider Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle, who are famous for their fish-throwing, but have never actually spent anything on advertising -- are they marketing or not?
LinkedIn is aging like fine wine in Microsoft’s cellar.
Microsoft surprises me with OpenAI, LinkedIn and GitHub. Their own engineering practices aren’t that great but they seem to excel at what to acquire and what to invest in.
Is there a non-shitty version of LinkedIn somewhere that I don’t know about? The one I use seems to have turned into a version of Facebook with rants trying to get me to buy into glorifying the grind instead of photos of kids and political rants.
There is unfollow button which works very well and changes your experience somewhat. Of course it does not matter that much because most LinkedIn content is rather bad.
It's only been the last few weeks that LinkedIn started laying out so many "suggested " posts that every person you unfollow only creates more room for more "trending" crap.
Email spam where they put the sender name as a person you know and write the subject line like it was written by that person you know. Incredibly deceptive.
I assumed that when m_a_g said "LinkedIn is aging like fine wine in Microsoft’s cellar." he was talking about what happens to fine wine when you put it in a crappy cellar: it slowly turns to vinegar.
About 3 hours of dedicated feedback to the algorithm (including plenty of unfollowing, which is different from removing connection) has turned made it quite bearable. I don't _love_ it but OTOH I appreciate a place that I can be reminded of my weak connections without doom scrolling.
You're thinking in the lens of a consumer, that's the issue. I'm sure to Nadella MSFT is making off like a bandit. The users looking for a job aren't the customers of LinkedIn.
LinkedIn seems to have been at Stage 2 of Doctorow's enshittification pattern for years now: blatantly hostile to its users, but (as far as I know) doing right by advertisers.
> Is there a non-shitty version of LinkedIn somewhere
Sure - it's the version you get if you stop connecting with people who post 'grind' rants and whatever else you don't want to see (or at least unfollow them, if you can't avoid connecting with them).
My favourite use of LinkedIn is when a company "wrongs me" in some way, as a means to find a suitable VP/SVP on LinkedIn, see if LinkedIn wil give me another free month of premium in desperation to try to get me back as a paying user like I was once many years ago, and then Inmail said people.
My best result was when DHL had flat out lied to me and claimed my package was on a ship back to the US from Europe and would be back with the sender in a month (it had been misaddressed; we'd told them that before the package had even left the US, but they insisted there was nothing they could do).
Messaged an SVP, who seemed appalled, and got copied on an e-mail thread from said SVPs executive assistant who pointedly remarked that her boss wanted to be kept updated. This happened Friday evening, right before the end of the day. A flurry of emails ensued. Monday morning the package that was supposedly crossing the Atlantic arrived at my office, delivered from the DHL depot 5 minutes down the road.
It's a bit up and down, but really the larger layer of middle management a company has, the easier it seems to be to find someone on LinkedIn who is sufficiently insulated from customer complaints normally that they'll take a personal interest when one manages to slip through and reveals things might not be how they thought they were (finding SVPs at DHL was like shooting fish in a barrel; the sheer number to choose from was ridiculous)
Yeah, I've done it there too, but it worked better before - these days it really depends on whether a company has a proper team monitoring Twitter. I think Inmail has worked for me mostly because "nobody" does it, so it's a novelty.
For me, it's just networking - i.e. does anyone I know (well enough to call for a favor, at least) work anywhere interesting? It's helped me get at least two jobs that way (over a decade, so I'm not suggesting this is constant value).
It's also helped me help other people I used to work with get jobs where I could connect them with a recruiter/manager.
I don't think the news feed has particular value (though I do see some interesting folks migrating away from X to posting things on LinkedIn), but I think pretending the site sucks because you've connected with/followed boring or uninteresting people is kind of weird and indicates a failure to understand that it's still essentially self-curated social media.
You can connect with people who may help you find a job in the future, and unfollow them while staying connected.
My LinkedIn account is curated once a week: I am linked to less than 100 people that I have personally met, but I only see the posts from friends and nice coworkers. Best of both worlds IMHO.
more offers, maybe. But LinkedIn isn't some super necessary tool for tech workers to begin with. I use it as a fancy co-worker/potential job list and nothing more. I even cull contacts after the latter is no longer in consideration, which goes against how you should use LinkedIn (to help find indirect contacts).
I imagine for fields like marketing and design that LinkedIn is as important as Github is to a programmer, though. Also Freelance types of work. Fields where who you know can be almost as important as what you know, and where most hires are made based on gut feelings. Someone
The amount of crazy conspiracy theorists and politics on LinkedIn is growing very quickly. It's competing for the large share of cringe posts with selfies.
I'll suggest that a) a lot of that content is bot generated (uncontroversial), and b) perhaps those behind the bots are seeing a greater "return" on their investment targeting LinkedIn users rather than say FB/X/TT/IG/YT users.
If b) is true, perhaps this means that LinkedIn users are more "valuable" as targets to influence because they are typically white-collar workers, a significant subset of which will have some influence within their workplace?
Making Windows work across the diversity of hardware it does, in basically every language, is impressive to me. Azure seems to work pretty impressively at scale, Xbox is no slouch, and Bing is the only credible alternative to Google.
Office is everywhere, Email is done at scale, OneDrive is simple and effective, again at scale.
Or we can look at the deep levels of Enterprise integrations (Active Directory, SQL Server, Group Policies et al)
Or what about development tools like Visual Studio, languages like C++ or C#, or a bunch of other stuff in that lin
I get the "Microsoft is evil" mantra from the Open Source community, and thats certainly well deserved. They're far from perfect, their business practices in the past have been down right bad, but I'm not sure their Engineering is the area I'd fault them for.
Have you worked at Microsoft? I have. Their engineering practices are suspect at best. Nobody in Office actually knows what's going on -- it's difficult to find anyone who actually understands more than a tiny, tiny fragment of the stack. And the not-my-problem culture from the days of Gates and Ballmer stack-ranking is absolutely still present -- I found what looked like a pretty major security bug (expired user certs being accepted, including those for a service admin account), and was told by multiple long-tenured, senior engineers, that since it wasn't our service misbehaving, I shouldn't worry about it. (I ignored them, dug in more, discovered it was a totally unrelated -- and less scary -- bug, and still found the owning team to let them know.)
I've worked at -- including Microsoft -- three major tech companies and a quant hedge fund, and Microsoft's engineering practices -- at least within the Office org, where I worked -- are appalling by almost any measure, in comparison with their competitors. Their success is largely down to three things, IMO:
1. First-/early-mover advantage in many spaces.
2. Excellent business management.
3. Some very, very strong engineers at the principal level and higher.
It _used_ to be appalling (on release, XP was the most security-holey thing you can imagine, and Vista barely worked at all, say), but it does seem to be generally improved these days.
I spent a significant amount of time on LinkedIn this past year. I don't think I'd really engaged in the platform in any meaningful way in over a decade.
I found the rise and grind culture really off-putting and was delighted to delete it from my phone last week.
I find it increasingly repulsive to read. I'm not even surprised on the FB-like newsfeed full of ads (all suggested/promoted), but the happy-go-lucky, ignorant, agressively positive tone people strike there is hard to bear. As if everyone were a CEO TED speaker, everything is positive learning and growth, nothing remotely controversial.
This could have been a platform for professional exchange, hell, even something Substack-like.
One wouldn't think that Twitter and LinkedIn's ad markets are 1:1 but I guess advertisers have to put their budget somewhere for the time being. It would be interesting to see how ad campaigns that targeted Twitter's more general user base fare on the more professionally-minded LinkedIn. I'm far more likely to be interested in an AppleTV ad on Twitter than if I saw it on LinkedIn but that might just be me.
I mean, they’re definitely not; I assume Coca-cola isn’t running big brand-building campaigns on LinkedIn, even now, say. But there’d certainly be _some_ crossover.
My partner's ecommerce business spends millions a year on marketing and is typical of the type of SME that represents the bulk of total advertising spend.
Twitter/X has always been a far distant third to Meta and Google. It's targeting performance is poor, return on ad spend poor and the capabilities of the ad platform poor. Maybe for some niches e.g. AI startup it was useful but for most SME it was useless and their percentage of overall ad spend reflects this.
For large brands what it was good for was brand awareness. Nothing makes you appear relevant than being alongside the latest trends or news which Twitter excelled it. Which is why when their ads appeared alongside hate speech they were so quick to move. Because they didn't have any real money being generated with them anyway.
You can't put the Elon BS aside because it continually impacts the efficacy of ads on the X/Twitter.
A larger percentage of the ads are scams surrounding trends like NFTs because of his dictated moderation and staffing changes.
Views are amplified for himself and his preferred posters - which for all you know may land your company's logo next to Alex Jones.
> Putting all of the Elon BS aside. Can someone in marketing shine some light on how does X compare to other platforms?
Brand/PR/Reputation is a liability and most big enterprises will continue to optimize for diminishing liabilities by moving to more reliable platforms.
The “BS” label is important though: that hints that GP does indeed think it can be ignored/doesn’t exist. A retort to this isn’t unwarranted if you believe that Musk’s actions does impact ad spending.
I agree, for the purpose of scholarly dissection of the subject, it’s perfectly fine.
My point was that lining it up by calling it “BS” invites counter arguments, which is what happened here. If you’re not happy to implicitly accept the “BS”, you’ll have to address it.
Dropping the “BS” label would have led to a more focused discussion. It matters _how_ you ask a question.
I see your point and agree that clarity may have helped. I read "BS" a little differently, as acknowledgement that all of the Elon stuff is a shambolic mess.
It also seems to be the case that some people didnt just disagree with the BS classification, but fundamentally disagree that anything besides Elon is a valid topic of conversation.
IT does matters how you ask a question, but some people will reject or change the topic no matter how you ask it.
Right, it might read as "Musk's bullshit" or "the bullshit aimed at Musk." Either way, the ambiguity doesn't help. It might tick off both Musk-huggers and Musk-whippers, depending on how they read it.
Comes off as abrasive IMO. Someone might as well reply "I don't care that you don't care" then. You're more likely to get a good response from cutting all of that out and just leaving the meat: "I want to know about the current ROI for Twitter advertising, in standard marketing metrics."
The abrasiveness picks up in your replies. It comes off as if you went in looking for a fight. I don't know if you did or not, but the quality of the response reflects the attitude in which your question was posed. In my opinion.
And he's saying there's almost no point in asking that question because Elon's way of running the company has been so impactlful to the platform that considering it without him is pointless.
Musk fired the majority of people working at Twitter, changed the brand, unbanned very controversial users, alienated most of the advertisers, etc etc etc. Talking about Twitter without talking about his leadership is to have a conversation without merit. What other topics are there? He owns the company. Every policy change over the past year has been his personal decision.
Most of the major corporations who were advertising on Twitter seem to be worried about their brand getting placed next to some neo-nazi shit right now. That is directly related to decisions Musk has made. Additionally, he took it private so it's not like we can read their quarterly reports. It's impossible to have a meaningful conversation about this company without talking about the new owner. Any conversation that doesn't somehow relate to him is going to be incomplete. That's much less true if we were talking about Meta, or Google, or Apple. But we're talking about Twitter, which is currently in the process of being managed into the ground.
It seems like you simply cant imagine that someone else might have a different conversational topic or interest. I genuinely feel sorry for you.
It is like people that interject wokeism, Obama, or Trump into any conversation, even if you are talking about the weather. A conversation about the sunset is not "complete" or "meaningful" without ranting about what they want. They just cant comprehend someone having a different interest.
It seems almost obsessive compulsive. Someone asks what letter comes after X, and they cant talk about Y, because any discussion of the alphabet is "incomplete" or "meaningless" without starting at A, B, & C and discussing it at length. All letters come after A, so all conversations are about A.
IF you tried, can you even come up with 3 questions and answers about twitter without making it about Musk?
IIRC Twitter charges a fair bit more per impression than IG/FB/etc. (like $3 vs $.50?) but they also average higher engagement/click-through's than their contemporaries, like 10-15x (again if memory serves). It's been a while since I looked at these stats though.
What I don't recall is the amount of ads flowing on each site. I do believe facebook generally has more ads happening than the rest.
The thing is you can't put it aside. People are leaving in droves, as are advertisers. At this point brands don't want to even be on X, much less advertise there. That compares _badly_ to other platforms, needless to say.
I was chatting with someone recently who is still on Xitter and he was wondering why so many of his followers had recently been "suspended". I got to wondering: if a lot of people are leaving and X doesn't want that to be something the remaining people focus on are they just calling people who have deleted their accounts "suspended"?
I stopped posting to Twitter some time last year but most of the people I follow on Twitter/X are still active and haven't moved. It is still the biggest platform compared to any of the alternatives (Mastodon/Bluesky) and despite the downward spiral it will be with us for a long time (just like Facebook).
I am not and have never been on Twitter so I can't speak for what's happening on the platform but the places I frequent that post news that's broken on Twitter haven't stopped doing that so, at the very least, influential people are still breaking news there at the same place.
I can't help but think that the people leaving Twitter meme is wishful thinking by people who dislike Musk.
The valuation really tells the story, I think. There's no way to square "Twitter's valuation drops 75%" and "everyone is still on Twitter and just as engaged as ever". These cannot possibly both be true at once.
Sure they can. You assume the valuation is directly proportional to the traffic of twitter. It's likely more about the ad customers on twitter, and they very much are leaving in droves from what I'm hearing. That doesn't mean the users aren't still there.
I'll ask the corollary question to rein this in: where are people going if they aren't on twitter anymore? Tiktok? Instagram? It sure isn't Bluesky at the moment.
I sure wish they were. I think that's exactly why for this brief moment the GP wants to focus more on he business realities than the same drama that's happened for the past 6 months.
Anyone still left on Twitter at this point has clearly signaled that the terminally online nature of it is more important than anything else. IE, they are signalling that getting the most banal comments from important people the very second they make them is more important to them than getting quality content, or not supporting an actively hostile system, or doing actual journalism.
I really really don't need up to the second information about whatever Corey Doctorow is saying, as I read his books almost twenty years ago and they still seem to accurately portray his thoughts on many things, also he has a blog. Doomscrolling a tiny cachet of "important to me" people, isn't actually important or useful. You lived just fine before Twitter, surely you will do okay getting your news 24 hours behind some person who hasn't left twitter but somehow is able to sort through all the dross to pull out what little signal is still there.
Sure, I agree. And I also think that the lion's share of people prefer convenience over quality 99.99% of the time. I don't know if that's a mentality that can be changed, and Twitter captured most of that market.
You can only become the next twitter and be subject to the same flaws or try to seek out the relative minority that is seeking quality over noise.
Twitter/X seems to have good engagement and there are active Geopolitics, Israeli/Zionist, Palestinian/Muslim, Russian, Ukrainian (NAFO), Covid, anti-MSM, anti-Disinfo, populist, Crypto/NFT, Black American, sports, and many Indian and African spaces on an ongoing regular basis, several running concurrently at many times of the day. I like that I can go into multiple spaces at different times and hear radically different perspectives unfiltered. This is why the platform appears to be getting much more sticky.
The Spaces bug where you can't hear people is the most annoying thing about it, other than the link interception.
I'm bothered by the 3 levels of subscription - the basic, premium and premium+. The premium still has ads everywhere, and the + does not, but costs more. I think both should be ad-free. I hate ads particularly when I am already paying for the service!
https://help.twitter.com/en/using-x/x-premium#tbpricing-byco...
Given that Premium users are supposed to see 50% less ads, I cannot imagine what kind of ad hellscape it would be if I was not at premium level. I block every ad X account I see.
It is a good place for breaking news and unfiltered data. There is still weaponization of the CommunityNotes, and active shilling and astroturfing by intelligence agencies doing propaganda online.
I have not used Grok at all so I cannot comment there
Many of the people that I engage with on Twitter have been censored on other platforms, folks that are described as the Classical Left, Libertarian Left, Libertarian Right, Populists, the Antiwar types, and now it includes both Palestinian and Zionist perspectives,
I'd like to hear these viewpoints without going through gatekeeper MSM
Since I am a paying customer and I block all ads, I am not sure how much the ad stuff matters. I hate ads!
Twitter/X hasn't traditionally been cheaper than other brand-awareness ad spends, and has performed worse. The best argument for Twitter/X was always that the audience size mattered less than the audience influence.
This is why the abandonment of Twitter/X by large audience segments has been such a compounding effect. Even if they can replace 1:1 people they're losing with new users, if the users aren't the right type of demographic, ad spend is going to collapse.
It will depend on what you are looking to get out of advertising - immediate sales or engagement/awareness.
If you are an eCommerce business selling a widget then you can easily get a cost per conversion, and then it's pretty easy to optimise your spend to maximise profits (i.e. If I spend $30 on ads, I can sell a product I buy for $40 for $90 making $20). I've seen businesses with this revenue model who will spend the equivalent of c.30-40% of revenue to get the sales due to the high margins often involved.
Your conversion will depend a lot on your product, target market, the ad etc (if you are selling a business rolodex your CPC might be better on linkedin, if you are selling a selfie-stick your CPC might be better on insta etc).
The effectiveness of advertising for engagement/brand awareness is much softer, and the spend will be much more discretionary as it is harder to track. It's these ads which are more likely to fall away IMO.
Trading 1 trash platform for another. LinkedIn could be such a great place if it didn't abuse your information and subscribe to such dark patterns. I still remember having my entire address book harvested and spammed (way back when). I will never forget that. I will never trust LinkedIn. Doesn't matter what they do.
I’ve never used it. Never even created an account… though I was on the receiving end of said address book harvesting, so they just created an account “for” me and spam me as if I’m a user nonetheless.
I use LinkedIn as in have an account, but I basically never log in except once every few months to accept invitations and maybe to update something on my profile. So from an ad selling perspective I might as well not have one.
I didn't even know LinkedIn had ads. I assume they made all their money from charging companies to post job postings (which are ads I guess) and recruiters to be able to reach out
I have an account there, but I wouldn't even see if I got a DM from someone I know because I eventually got sick of the recruiter spam to my email and marked it as such. I check it like once a year maybe? Do people actually use the site when they're not actively looking for a job? So far I've never even used it for that, and don't really know why I have a profile.
Well, I think the vast majority of LinkedIn ‘users’ never actually log in to it. Like, I have a LinkedIn account, because it’s virtually mandatory these days, but, given that I’m not looking for a job, I maybe look at it once every couple months to accept/reject connection requests, and that’s it.
For hiring, there are good alternatives, most often regional, and they can thrive since both sides of the deal are interested in any small/exotic pools of candidates, there is no need for masses. In the EU Honeypot comes to mind.
Twitter ads were mostly for brand awareness - the ads don't directly lead to sales, but they lead to a good brand image which leads to indirect sales later.
The effectiveness of brand ads is notoriously hard to measure, so it comes down to the gut feeling of marketing execs rather than cold hard numbers like CPA like google ads.
The gut feeling associated with twitter right now is, to put it mildly, rather low.
Ironic given half my LinkedIn feed has been overtaken by this ridiculous meta of screen capping your own tweets, photoshopping a blue tick into it and posting on LinkedIn.
I'd believe this more if it wasn't alleged that they were going to _LinkedIn_. Who the heck uses LinkedIn? And of those that do, how many of them are the target audience for Disney?
Do people actually benefit from this "professional network"? I mean has anyone actually found work like this? I just mentioned I'm free to real people I know.
Yes? First job I just found on a company website. Second as well, but I did talk to the recruiter and connect with them through LinkedIn in the process.
Third job was entirely through LinkedIn. found the job post there, found an old contact from college through there who gave me a referral, introduced to the recruiter through LinkedIn.
4th job is still up in the air, but I was approached for freelance work via LinkedIn in the meantime.
----
You definitely don't need to play the networing game to get a job, especially not if you're in tech. But having a publicly viewable resume sitting there and an old contact book of information (which is less intimate than asking for a number or email) was valuable enough for the $0 I directly paid for it. I do get 80% spam and recruiters who clearly never read my profile, but thats unfortunately most of society these days, be it internet, phone, or snail mail.
People on LinkedIn are real. If you use it like a communication tool, it can be very effective at locating opportunities or helping others do the same. I have thousands of loose connections on LinkedIn, many of whom I would/could never email/text/call directly looking for work. But with a single LinkedIn post, I am likely to get many responses / offers of help. I wouldn't bank on this being my only avenue to finding work, but it definitely is AN avenue if you use it right.
In parallel, many LinkedIn "influencers" are spamming garbage. You just need to ignore it, similar to how you might ignore garbage accounts on Twitter.
None of my actual jobs were through linkedin, but that's just luck. I've done several onsites as a result of either applying through linkedin, or because someone messaged me.
Given that Twitter now consists of Elon and whatever ragtag bunch of H1Bs are keeping the lights on, how can they possibly even go to the trade desk with a straight face? They literally have zero meaningful metrics at this point, and the brand value is trending into the negative.
Don't worry, it's going great! 99,99% of Tweet impressions are healthy! No single user saw these Nazis next to your ads! These metrics are as trustworthy as our leadership!
When I was in high school and college, I had bad insomnia. I watched a lot of late night TV as a consequence. I understood demographics and targeted advertising, and I found it insulting how asinine late night TV ads were. This is who they think I am?
Took me a while to realize that very few of those ads were really targeted, it’s just when the cheap ad slots were. If you spend a lot on ads it’s valuable to spend a bit more to make sure they’re connecting. But if you’re going cheap the shotgun effect isn’t a terrible strategy.
I think X is quickly going to find that Billy Mays was a paragon of cheap ad placements and half of what they get will be worse.
I very clearly recall going through the cleaning goods aisle with my then three-year-old sitting in the cart when he saw something familiar, perked up and yelled, "Dad, you have to get Oxy-Clean. It gets the tough stains out."
"Kid, we really need to cut back on your TV time."
i love these comments. i never have a problem with comments where people are drawing on something they experienced. i treasure those comments. its funny because every other comment makes me feel like shit. like the world has gone to shit. and i make a lot of them.
its funny that you would think that those ads were targeted to you. television was so insanely monolithic. it was a shared experience. everyone thought the same thing. the idea of targeting anyone in particular with television seems silly today…
Lately, my X feed has been showing a lot of ads for cheap Aliexpress drop-shipped products that are way overpriced. (selling for $24 what you can find on Amazon for $8)
Maybe that's just because of the Christmas selling season, or maybe that's a hint of the new normal.
It's the norm in most entry level content pipelines. Instagram for example has been autogenerated computer voiced spam audio over stock footage for a literally physically impossible product for years. You basically cannot buy a legitimate product from an instagram ad.
For a decade or more, a reliable grift has been selling "buy something on ali-express and sell it on another site for 10x markup" as some sort of business secret to low information people and other scam-vulnerable populations, and nearly all of them nowadays amount to "the next step is to buy $10k worth of ads on instagram" for the same white label product that everyone else is dropshipping. They're just get-rich-quick schemes. That's why they are so clearly low effort and fraudulent, because that's just how get-rich-quick schemes always are, because the target audience believes that if they just scam a little harder, they can be rich too.
1. Google Search
2. Meta/YouTube (maybe TikTok)
3. Other platforms/bets
Bucket three is basically all of Reddit/Snap/X/Pinterest/LinkedIn etc., they are all sub scale, and they all perform worse than the other platforms in almost every single niche. None of them work particularly well, everyone knows they don't work super well, but we all keep throwing a few dollars their way because the idea of business performance being at the whim of two companies is frightening. They're all fighting over scraps though.
I'm probably being a little hyperbolic, but probably not by much.