Is Doomberg Right In Blaming New Twitter Management For A Decline In Engagement?
Doomberg, a well-known fintwit account and Substack newsletter, has announced their decision to discontinue active engagement on Twitter due to a significant decline in their engagement metrics, ranging from 50% to 95%, following the implementation of new Twitter management.
In a recent piece on its Substack platform, the anonymous publisher announced that it will no longer be active on Twitter, now known as X, after noticing some changes in their account’s performance on the platform since the new owner, Elon Musk, took over.
“Four months and multiple policy changes later, the mere mention of ‘Substack’ in a tweet leads to substantial de-boosting, and we suspect many accounts closely associated with the site are being punished by the algorithm,” Doomberg wrote.
In September of 2022, just before Twitter transitioned to a private company, Doomberg said it experienced its most successful month on the platform. Tweets garnered nearly 50 million impressions, resulting in an impressive gain of 31,000 new followers. Unfortunately, the performance has been in a downward trend ever since.
Last month, the metrics plummeted anywhere from 50% to 95% compared to those peak numbers. To conduct an experiment, Doomberg recently shared a link to its latest piece, which would typically receive hundreds of likes on the previous version of Twitter. Despite having over 258,000 followers, the outcome was far from satisfactory for Doomberg, only getting 15,000 impressions and 14 likes.
The platform compared it to a tweet it posted in September 2022, which got 613 likes.
“Starting today, we will be placing our Twitter account on Lurker mode and shifting our limited resources to Notes. We will no longer actively engage with the platform, and direct messages will be infrequently checked. This was a difficult decision for our small team to make, but one we are all at peace with. Twitter, quite literally, isn’t Twitter anymore—last week, it became X,” the platform said.
Is it really the platform?
However, many observers noted that the account’s performance can’t be solely blamed on the platform changes. Joe Weisenthal, co-host of the Odd Lots podcast, noted that Doomberg had struck a content goldmine in September 2022 as it talked about the energy crisis during the time when there was actually an energy crisis sprouting from Germany across the European countries.
“I also think that if the main thing is ‘Europe is screwed due to electricity costs’ then it makes sense that engagement peaks at the same time as electricity costs,” Weisenthal also wrote.
It can be recalled that during September 2022, Germany was on the brink of energy crisis as it rushed to fill up the gas reserves it needed for the then oncoming winter following Russia’s Gazprom’s decision to cut the Nord Stream supply to the European Union.
Recently, Musk fulfilled his idea to change Twitter to X. The social media platform is bending over backwards to improve its revenue stream in an attempt to plug the losses it is taking in. X Corp., the platform’s parent firm is making changes to its verification process, informing advertisers that, effective August 7, brand accounts will lose their verification, symbolized by the coveted gold check mark, if they fail to meet certain spending thresholds.
Advertisers must spend at least $1,000 on ads in the preceding 30 days or a minimum of $6,000 on ads in the previous 180 days to retain their verified status, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.
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