The downfall of Twitter may devastate social listening … for awhile
Like most people in this space, I’ve been watching the implosion of Twitter with varying degrees of interest, eye rolling and disgust. But one nagging question has grown into a steady and increasingly loud drumbeat in my mind: WHAT HAPPENS TO SOCIAL LISTENING IF TWITTER GOES AWAY?
For those of you who have no clue what I’m talking about, let me help you with a little background and a connect-the-dots primer. Stay with me here.
Companies are very, very interested in what the public thinks about their company, their products, their competition, and just about anything else you can think of.
In the past 20 years, companies have realized that they can mine public chatter on social media platforms to basically use the data like a very public, very real-time focus group. What do people think about X? What are the main complaints about product Y? Companies can find out in real time, with real data, and they LOVE it.
Over the years, two other important trends have come into play:
This data has become monetized. How do you think Facebook and Twitter make money? They sell ads to advertisers and they sell their data. And it’s worth a lot.
Concerns about personal information and security have caused some public platforms (especially Facebook and LinkedIn) to ratchet back the amount of data that they allow to be “scraped” for this type of analysis.
This has left Twitter as the primary source of this “public square” type of data. In essence, while Facebook and LinkedIn have scaled back the amount of data they are willing to sell, Twitter’s data feed (called an API) has remained largely public and largely “scrape-able.” And this means that over time, companies engaging in “social listening” have become increasingly reliant on Twitter as a bit of a canary in a coal mine. If it’s happening on Twitter, we can extrapolate that it’s happening everywhere else. By all means, this is a flawed way to do analysis. But it’s the best we can do, so that’s what companies have universally adopted as a best practice.
In the past several years as the amount of data from other sources has dwindled and the interest and investment in social listening has grown, Twitter has become a bell weather of sorts. It is not uncommon, depending on the topic matter and specific data set being analyzed, that the bulk of the data in such an analysis is coming from Twitter these days. Sometimes I run reports and as much as 80 or 90 percent of the data is from Twitter vs. the other social platforms.
End primer. Still there? If I haven’t bored you to tears, this brings us back to the fundamental question: What will happen to social listening if Twitter goes away?
Let me say from the get-go that I have no answers. This is very much a wait-and-see situation. But I do have a few predictions:
The social listening town square of the world will be closed for business. Any company doing this type of social listening will see a dramatic drop in its metrics (if you were around when Facebook pulled the plug on keyword searches across all public posts, it’ll be like that but worse). Companies are going to have to figure out how to glean insights in different ways at least in the short term, and they may even have to go back to some of the slower methods that have been displaced by social listening.
The insights that we are able to glean will be reported with big asterisks. Reports will have to include disclaimers explaining that this is just a small sampling of the conversation and may not represent the whole conversation. Reports that are compiled quarterly or monthly will need callout boxes explaining large YoY drops for at least a year, if not more.
The likelihood of misreading the tea leaves will go way up. From a straight data analysis point of view, more data is better. So if you go from say 50 percent of all available posts to 20 percent, your accuracy will diminish and you your chance of accidentally drawing bad conclusions goes up. There’s not much to do about that. Teams will be hamstrung by the data that is publicly available – they don’t control it.
There may be staffing implications. Some companies have built entire analytics teams to crunch data and report on insights. With limited data to crunch, some of those jobs may go away.
Tool vendors will have a tough time. There are a number of very good tools out there that enable companies to mine all of this data and glean insights quickly. With no data to analyze, these tools will have a tough time justifying their often six-figure price tags and signing up new clients if they can’t promise robust insights.
Teams that don’t have social governance will need it. As I’ve written before, companies are starting to create full-time social media governance roles to ensure compliance with things like GDPR and to ensure all of this data is managed responsibly. Despite the decrease in data, I predict these roles will grow in number and scope.
But, should Twitter really simply cease to operate, there is still a silver lining. If there’s anything that 20 years in this space has taught us, it’s that nothing in social is static and companies are smart when it comes to creating revenue streams. More predictions:
It may take a year or two, but whatever replaces Twitter (Mastadon or something else) will eventually realize that there is income to be made by selling their data. An IPO and a good healthy dose of due diligence later, and this new contender will likely decide that going public and monetizing its data stream is a good thing.
The companies that make those fancy tools will invest a lot of time and resources into developing ways for AI to glean all the insights that are there to glean. In other words, the tool vendors will still try to earn their keep by engineering their products to deliver as much possible value as they can based on the data available. There will be more money poured into analyzing photo and video content with no text, logo recognition and other bells and whistles.
Give it some time and the world of social listening will correct itself. I am certain of it. The industry is really good at adjusting to changes because things change every minute of every day. But we may be in for a couple of rough years where social listening is less of a crucial tool due to lack of data availability. There could be a period where some of these tool vendors have to lower their prices because the product just doesn’t provide as much value as it used to. Most sadly, when the data does come back, social teams are going to have to essentially start over internally justifying the value of social listening, and that is a real shame. It’s going to be very interesting to watch it play out.
At this point, it’s foolish to even say “I really hope Twitter makes it,” because the truth is that the company’s recent flood of insane headlines may have scared off the user base permanently. So even if Twitter survives, will it still be the public town square? Or will the public migrate en masse to a new town square? Time will only tell. But watch this space. I’m pretty sure that social listening will never be quite the same.