FIR #514: Was Twitter A One-And-Done Phenomenon?

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FIR #514: Was Twitter A One-And-Done Phenomenon?

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There’s a concept circulating in Platformer, the Reuters Institute, and Nieman Lab: the text-based social networks that defined the last 15 years of public communication may be in irreversible decline. Apptopia reports that Bluesky’s daily users are down 96% from January 2024; Threads has lost users in seven of the past eight months (down 61% from its October 2024 peak); and X has been “culturally altered.” At its peak, was Twitter less a replicable product category than a unique moment in media history? The mass audience has moved to short-form video, algorithmic feeds reward attention over the social graph, and platforms increasingly refuse to be referral engines. Text still thrives in newsletters, Reddit, Discord, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, and AI chat interfaces — what’s collapsing isn’t text, but giant algorithmic public feeds. Neville and Shel look at what this means for communicators: the promise of scale is giving way to relevance, trust, and consistency — a shift that requires a different approach to brand presence on social. Get details in this not-so-short midweek FIR episode. Links from this episode: Are the Twitter clones in trouble?Pew: Americans’ Social Media Use 2025Pew: Social Media and News Fact SheetReuters: Mapping news creators and influencers in social and video networks The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, May 25. We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com. Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music. You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients. Raw Transcript Neville: Hi everybody, and welcome to For Immediate Release episode 514. I’m Neville Hobson. Shel: And I’m Shel Holtz. Communicators devote a fair amount of time to social media management. It’s no different where I work. We’re a smaller team in the construction industry, so we don’t have any dedicated social media resources. But whether it’s a company like mine, where it’s part of the job that somebody does, or a global brand like Wendy’s or Starbucks with a full-blown team, everyone’s trying to make an impact on social network users. The strategy behind those efforts may need an overhaul, though, to address the decline of text-based social networks. Platformer’s Casey Newton wrote about this recently, focusing on Threads, Bluesky, and X — but I think it’s fair to throw Facebook into the mix. Depending on whose numbers you believe, Threads has lost momentum, Bluesky never became the Twitter replacement that political journalists or media folks had hoped it would be, and X is, well, shall we say, culturally altered. Meta and Bluesky dispute some of this third-party data, so I don’t want to overstate the precision of the numbers, but we shouldn’t shrug off the larger point. This isn’t about whether Threads beats X or whether Bluesky can recover, but rather about whether that old Twitter model can be rebuilt at all. And increasingly, the answer looks like probably not. Twitter at its peak was a real-time public layer for news, commentary, expert reaction, and professional visibility. Journalists, politicians, academics, CEOs, and PR people were all there reacting to each other in public. That gave communicators something we had never really had before: a live dashboard of what influential people were saying, what stories were breaking, and how publics were interpreting events in real time. The problem is that this depended on a specific set of conditions — a text-first interface, a public follow graph, a tolerance for public argument, and a shared assumption that this was where you went to see what was going on. Even with a small subscriber base compared to Facebook and a lot of other networks, Twitter was where news broke, and it was frequently cited in the mainstream media’s reporting. Well, those conditions have changed. The mass audience has moved heavily toward video. TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts are now the primary discovery platforms for younger users in particular. News and commentary arrive as video, personality, remix, and clip. In fact, I was talking about this recently with someone I work with who said she doesn’t watch Saturday Night Live — she watches 10 or 15 of the clips that Saturday Night Live shares on YouTube so she can catch the funniest bits. At the same time, the logic of the feed has changed. The old social feed was built around who you followed. The new algorithmic feed is built around what holds attention. A post on early Twitter spread because of the social ...

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