We had an open Twitter Space conversation with Uche Kene, Growth Marketing Manager at Zazuu to discuss Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase and what it means for digital creators.

Uche works at the intersection of product, marketing, and data to grow early-stage startups. He specializes in unlocking product market fit, building sustainable retention loops, and driving organic acquisition for holistic early-stage startup growth.

Let’s dive right into it!

Selar: The reason we have you here is that you have been so particular about Elon Musk’s change, so what does that mean to you?

Uche:  I follow Elon closely. I agree with his philosophy about how to sort of live your life. Recently, he purchased Twitter and I honestly wish he did that for other companies like Facebook. Maybe he had his own personal reasons.

I would say at first, it didn’t really mean anything to me. Aside from that I actively use Twitter, I don’t have a business on Twitter. It was less of how it affected me personally and more of how technology would always be technology. So there’d be a next phase. 

I don’t know Elon personally. I just know his ability to influence industries and categories. So with the Twitter purchase, I just said I’m trusting this guy’s judgment again, dude will cause a tangible change.

Selar: Amazing! Elon has done an amazing job from Paypal, and Tesla, down to SpaceX. His Twitter purchase is very surprising but good. And besides, it’s Elon, he’s smart.

Let’s come from the creator’s point of view, you are a growth marketer, right?

Uche: Yeah

Selar: One thing about growth marketing is your traffic channel. How do you think these changes would affect advertisers and the algorithm?

Uche: Everything happening now is very hypothetical. One of Elon’s major concerns is the high number of bots and not necessarily active accounts on the platform. It is also what is influencing his thoughts around charging even for verification.

So, the thought pattern is, if you’re charged for a feature, it gives a sign that you’d be an active user of the platform from a good standpoint. One that needs the feature and doesn’t mind the price to keep using it. With this new change, it’d be easier to identify active accounts. Growth and Marketing teams would find this very useful. 

For advertisers, It’d be a learning stage. Because this new rule means lots of things are different. So it’s best to learn what new things are happening. Does individual verification mean that there’d be verification for businesses? Does it mean that as a business, you need a back-end verification for when you’re setting up ads?

Does it also impact the way viewers would think about verified accounts? Before now, if a verified account tweets something, or runs an ad, there’s a huge mental respect we have for the account.

So if we say only upgraded accounts have the bluetick does it mean that if I see a bluetick on an account,  it means this person has some bucks to spare? 

Does it show what kind of product I can sell to the person? Does it tell the kind of product that can be sold to you? Can you now target verified accounts? 

I believe a learning phase has to first happen before advertisers can sufficiently reference data significant enough to make inferences. 

Selar: That is a very interesting perspective. 

From my point of view, There would be lots of changes to how we interact on Twitter, apart from the whole verification thing. I think one thing Elon Musk is going to focus on is making the algorithm work. 

So if you think of other platforms like the Meta group and other companies. The algorithm is difficult. To grow organically there, you have to put in a whole lot of work. When you make a post on Instagram, it’s like only one percent of your followers see it. 

I think Elon Musk will focus on making the algorithm work in such a way that organic growth will be a priority. For platforms like TikTok, organic growth is very rewarding. Creators want to be rewarded for their hard work. 

Now this will differentiate people who share valuable content from those who just have followers with no good content. Creators should task themselves with putting out content valuable to their audience. This will be the point where the algorithm favors those who are good at what they do. 

Twitter is more like a town hall and if you want to get the attention of the people in your town hall, you need to start creating engaging conversations worth listening to. This is what I think creators should focus on. What do you think Uche?

Uche: Yeah definitely. When you look at platforms that have experienced success when it comes to creator contribution such as YouTube, Pinterest, etc, you’d see a trend, which is that these platforms have figured out a reward threshold for their average creator. This reward now encourages others to keep creating. 

YouTube, for example, was the first to ensure that creators who create very organic, evergreen, and highly engaging content, have the right to easily start monetizing on YouTube. 

This does a lot of things generally, by encouraging one who intends to start creating engaging content on the platform. 

We see TikTok doing it. Theirs is even on a fast level. Videos are harder to create on YouTube. There is a standard. But you can use your phone and record something, publish it and start getting views. When this happens, you’d definitely be hooked to keep creating for the platform which is why you can’t say you are tired of the content on TikTok. It is endlessly entertaining. So if Twitter can learn from TikTok to reward creators, it’d be massive. 

Selar: Amazing, talking about rewarding creators, I don’t know if Twitter does that currently, just like how YouTube pays its users for having a particular number of views and subscribers. I think Instagram pays creators too, I’m not really sure, but do you think Twitter will get to that point where if its users hit a certain milestone, you get a reward for the work you have done so far?

Uche: Starting from the beginning, I wouldn’t say the willingness to create content is the problem, unlike other platforms. Twitter has been consistent. It is one platform that you can say has the healthiest distribution of all the generations on it.  

You will see the Gen Zs, Millennials, our Politicians, and Lecturers there. TikTok will not be like that, Snap chat will not be like that. No other platform has this kind of state where every generation can coexist as an equal form. It is huge. 

So I don’t think the reward system should be a strategy to get more people to tweet. Because when you think about it, Twitter is majorly texting. A video is hard to make, a picture is hard to take. But texts? I want to believe, is one of the easiest forms of communication. 

There are those who take their time to write a tweet, and there are others who include research and data in their thread. I believe those types of people should be rewarded especially for the uniqueness of their work. They educate us on the platform. In fact, it is one of the reasons I enjoy Twitter. I know I’d learn something new in some way. 

Selar: Makes sense! If you check the comments box, I just added a tweet that Elon said regarding the $8 per month verification badge, it would also give twitter the revenue to reward content creators. I think the creator economy has gotten to that point where they see the need to reward creators that are creating content on the platform. Let’s get to the $8 per month gist that everyone is talking about, what do you think about that though?

Uche: It is tricky because I understand that it is for the bluetick and I won’t really be bothered. I never had the blue tick anyway so I’d continue to use my Twitter like that. But my first question would be for those who had the blue tick before, does it mean they wouldn’t have it anymore because they need to be verified to have it? 

Do you think that is how it will play out? How do they intend for it to work out, first off? Is every blue tick going to go off, and then as people begin to upgrade, the blue tick starts coming out little by little?

What about the mindsets of those who already had the blue tick? Would they have the mind to pay for something they once enjoyed exclusively? 

I think there should be a price page where people can see other features they’d get for $8, not just the blue tick. Like is it coming with other integration features or not? If it’s not coming with other things, then the $8 sounds somehow 

Selar: Talking about features, he said you will also get piracy replies, mentions, and search which is to defeat spam and scam, the ability to post long videos and audio, and have as many ads. This will affect advertisers very well.

Uche: They will lose half as many eyes.

Selar: Exactly. That will affect advertisers and I don’t know how he plans to pull this because that is a revenue stream that he may lose.

So, if you are a creator, It’s time to brace up for winter. Winter is coming on Twitter for you because Elon will be making money.  

Uche: He also mentioned that part of the revenue from the subscription will be used to pay creators on the platform. 

Selar: Yeah, makes sense right? Let’s niche down to digital creators and affiliate marketers.  People that sell digital products and advertise their products. That’s a huge customer base Twitter would lose.

My suggestion is to go and build your email list. Use this time that you have to build your list because when that time comes and you want to run ads, you may be spending almost $10 per customer acquisition or per lead which is a lot, so that is something that you should consider. Generally, I think Elon is up to something with Twitter. 

Uche: The funny thing about this is that people pay for LinkedIn premium which is $50, and it is not cheap to the average market. But lots of them are skeptical about paying $8 for Twitter. It’s not like Elon wants to make Twitter an entirely paid platform. There would still be the free plan where everyone can tweet. But as Elon said, it’s not just the Blue tick. People are paying for the ability to post long videos, piracy replies, mentions, and many more things. 

What do you think Uche?

Uche: When you think of LinkedIn, you think of the value they tied to the premium. The value matches the price. There’s a strict difference between a premium account and a non-premium account.

The way it was arranged, you get notifications that people viewed your profile but you don’t know who. And you want to know who viewed your profile. That’s wild.
It’s done on other platforms but we take it for granted.

But because of the purpose of LinkedIn which is our professional connection, we all want to know who looked at our profile to enable us to make more intelligent moves.

So LinkedIn was able to identify the key value points and harnessed them into a price and it’s totally fine. People know what to expect when they pay for it. The outcome of all those things on LinkedIn is to get a Job. On average, $50 for getting access to professionals on LinkedIn is not a problem. Generally, it’s a well-thought-out process.

Selar: Interesting! I’m thinking that they can integrate this with Twitter Space where you can have a more podcast feature on Twitter, with the different episodes and everything. There’s so much they can do. It’s a huge potential and it’d serve creators well. Recordings of Twitter spaces should be a podcast. So they may find a way to make everything work.

Do you have any final words for creators to look out for? And how they should brace themselves for the future?

Uche: If you look at the new profile redesign, there’s a section that says “creator tools/studio”. That wasn’t there before. What it means is that there may be some thoughts as to how Twitter can be in a better position to seem more valuable to creators.

Generally, I think creators should be aware that they’d expect more features and initiatives to be announced moving forward. Part of the change would be to embrace more creator inclusion in what decisions they make product-wise. It’s just something any social platform that wants more longevity should think about.

Creators are self-sustaining social lifelines for social platforms. The more you find a way to reward creators, the more the platform succeeds. They remain relevant over time and enjoy evergreen content. So they should be on the lookout for any features and move quickly to enjoy any first-mover advantage.

Selar: Amazing! Personally, I think creators should build a list and discover other ways to build an audience, especially an email list because that’s what they have control over. Social media is a rented platform and you don’t have control over it. So figure out a way to build an audience without depending on Elon’s Twitter.