Cultural Content - guest post Monterey Bay Aquarium
How we broke up with Twitter / X
Afternoon Cultural Content,
This week we’ve got Emily Simpson (Content Strategist) and Liz MacDonald (Director of Content Strategy) from Monterey Bay Aquarium. They’re talking about the brilliant work they’ve been doing post Musk/Twitter-gate; ultimately deciding to leave that platform but invest their time in other ways including Twitch, Discord, TikTok and Bluesky. Really interesting for a rationale both for coming off X and taking that energy to great success elsewhere…
Over to Emily and Liz…
It can be hard to know when to call it when a relationship doesn’t feel as good as it once used to. For years, the magic was there. And then things shift, and suddenly you have to re-evaluate how you’re spending your energy, and how it's making you feel.
Of course, we’re talking about Twitter/X.
Monterey Bay Aquarium joined Twitter in May 2008. For 10 years, our followers grew slowly and steadily. As a platform, Twitter was an engine of Internet culture where we could engage with academics, comedians, journalists, personalities, and politicians. It was never our largest platform in terms of number of followers (hi Tumblr, we ♥️ you), but it was versatile and verdant. When Twitter’s live video app Periscope launched in 2015, we were one of the earliest adopters, and watched our Twitter followers grow as they engaged with our live streams of animals around the Aquarium or tidepooling trips along our coastline. In 2018, we went viral with a post that still tops our list of best performing content, with a reach of more than 11 million, and over a million engagements. Between 2015 and 2019, we more than doubled our audience, growing from 103,467 followers to 235,534.
However, trying to stay on top of the swift-moving conversations and conventions on Twitter required constant vigilance and life lived extremely online. As we tried to stay at the leading edge of the digital conversation on Twitter, a certain sense of urgency, anxiety, and never-enoughness started to take root.
Simultaneously, digital video was becoming increasingly important on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, pushing Periscope out of the daily internet zeitgeist and into obscurity.
And then the pandemic hit. With the Aquarium closed for 14 months, our digital engagements were a lifeline for both the organization and our followers. But it also marked a shift in our strategy, as we doubled down on live streaming to connect with content-hungry audiences locked down in their homes. We began to explore new platforms, such as Twitch, Discord, and SMS, appreciating the value of cultivating highly engaged people in these newer digital communities. We also found surprising sources of engagement and audience activation — like our YouTube community wall.
Coming out of the pandemic meant resources were still tight as the Aquarium worked on recovery and ramping back up our in-person operations. We couldn’t keep adding platforms to our plates without letting go of something. And the news coming out about Twitter and Elon Musk was troubling. We watched closely.
When Musk’s deal for Twitter closed in late October 2022, we started seeing follower loss and diminishing engagement. Posts that would normally see a thousand likes might get a hundred, and the substance of our replies went from highly engaged and curious to generic or, worse, nothing at all. Periscope officially died, the algorithm changed, and the Twitter that we once knew didn’t exist anymore. Not to mention the ongoing blue-check verification disaster — suddenly anyone could be Monterey Bay Aquarium and look the part. And as a non-profit, having to shell out $2,000 to $10,000 annually to be a “Verified Organization” was a price we weren’t ready to pay to stay on a platform that just kept hurting us.
Looking across the fourteen social platforms we actively manage, we realized our hearts really weren’t in Twitter anymore, and they definitely weren’t in X. For a while, we still went through the motions while we talked about our exit strategy, removed the Twitter icon and link from our website footer and email templates, claimed handles on the various platforms vying to be heir to Twitter, and kept focusing on ramping up our digital video output.
On Aug. 16, 2023, we wrote our final tweet and saw one last bump of engagement in our metrics. Sure, the platform reported we had a quarter million followers, but that last post had a reach of just 87K. While we no longer post actively, we didn’t delete our account entirely — there’s history there we value, no need to burn everything as we walk away.
One of the more difficult things to reconcile is there is no new direct replacement for what Twitter was in its heyday. There are moments we wish we still had the tool of a tweet to help us reach people, especially the media and politicians we could @ directly. But having a diversified social strategy has helped us let go of the past and move on from Twitter.
We’ve seen some success on BlueSky — we’re fortunate that one of our followers and friends from our time on Twitter was an early invitee to the platform and was able to facilitate getting us an invite right before leaving X (thank you, Darth). While it’s still going through growing pains (brace yourselves for some potentially NSFW images on your Discover feed, balanced, of course, by cute cat photos), in six months, we’ve grown to 54K followers and it /almost/ feels like heyday of Twitter, with an engagement-return on posting-investment that feels good. Now that it’s publicly available (as of February 6!), it will be interesting to see how else the platform and our audience change. Scrolling through the Discover feed over the last week, we’ve already seen more organizations breaking up with Twitter to join the ranks of us skeeters on BlueSky.
And then there’s Discord — the lovechild of old-school Yahoo message boards, Slack, and Reddit. Our journey of creating a Discord server has also had its ups and downs. The biggest difference between Discord and other social platforms is that on Discord we don’t have an algorithm to compete with — anything we post on there is sent directly to our server members. But setting up, promoting, and maintaining a server is a lot of work. Recently a hacker targeting verified servers was able to get in and wreak havoc — 2 minutes of hacking led to hours of clean-up work that we’re still recovering from. But if you’re looking for a more intimate conversation with super-fans or reaching a younger audience (most Discord users are Gen Z and younger millennials), Discord can’t be beat.
We’re also investing more effort in video — both for platforms we’ve been on for a long time (YouTube and Instagram) and new(er) to us platforms like Twitch for live streaming, and the behemoth of TikTok. It’s a strategy that’s worked out well for us, a brand that has a lot of gorgeous visuals inherently (who doesn’t want to watch a live sea otter cam or a view of crashing waves on their second monitor?).
Of course, there are always going to be other social platforms out there that we aren’t on, and can’t be on — each of them requires a lot of effort to learn their unique languages and quirks in order to be successful, and there’s just no way for us to do everything, everywhere, all at once. And there are some we tried and saw no future on. We’re in our post-break-up experimental phase, and it’s kind of freeing to know that even if we try something new, there’s no pressure to commit long-term.
And we suppose that’s the journey of life — the different chapters that begin and end, each relationship a teacher that helps us understand more about who we are at any given moment. The truth is, when you look around, there are lots of wonderful people all over the place who are willing to love and appreciate us, just waiting to make that connection. So go ahead, make X your ex. There are plenty of fish in the sea (just be mindful of the threat of overfishing, k, byee).