I’ve never embraced the “X” branding as a replacement for “Twitter.” Honestly, I’ve never even really gotten into the “X, formerly known as Twitter” rap common to Actual For-Real journalists and commentators, because if over a year into the platform’s rebranding, people haven’t grasped that X was formerly known as Twitter, I’m pretty sure that means it’s still known as Twitter.
Amid their rebranding process, X-formerly-known-as-Twitter took its sweet time shifting from “tweet,” as a verb or noun, to the generic “post.” (I do enjoy that the prompt text in the tweeting window has gained an exclamation point, because “What is happening?!” is a pretty apt question these days.) And with that change in mind, author Noah Lugeons proposed a repurposing of the abandoned branded term.
He ain’t wrong. Giving journalists a generic, platform-agnostic term for short messages on Twitter/Threads/Bluesky/etc. has a lot of merit to it, and, not gonna lie, giving a middle finger to Elon Musk in the process is just gravy.
(Ironically, Twitter fought pretty hard for “tweet” in the early aughts, arguing against two startups that got to “tweet” before Twitter was able to secure a trademark. Twitter argued that “tweet” was already famous before startup ad service Twittad used it in a tagline, and Twittad argued that “tweet” was actually invented by users and thus open season, and then they settled for an undisclosed amount of money and Twitter got the trademark. Oh, how the turns have tabled.)
The problem Elon/X/Twitter/whatever runs into — okay, one of the many problems — with the rebranding is that “X” is hard to make stick. It’s proving difficult, if not impossible, to trademark because… it’s a letter. And it’s a letter that doesn’t flow all that well in conversation. And while Twitter secured a vast portfolio of trademarked terms like “retweet” and “subtweet,” the change to “X” abandons that exclusivity in favor of the genericism of “post” and that uphill trademarking battle. Widespread adoption of “tweet” as a generic verb — known as trademark erosion, a la “Kleenex” or “Xerox” — would only make it more difficult for Twitter to regain any brand differentiation should it ever decide to reverse its ill-advised rebrand.
And regardless of how you feel about the creative/aesthetic value of Xification, the plunge of the actual brand equity is measurable and hard to ignore. Beyond Twitter’s overall value loss since it was purchased — 72%, as of January of this year, per Fidelity — Twitter’s brand equity has plummeted as well, by one estimation losing $5 billion since its 2022 purchase and dropping entirely out of Brand Finance’s rankings for 2024.
They coulda had a bad bitch.
So, in light of that plummet in brand equity and threats to the exclusivity of the original brand, can the Twitter brand make a comeback? One question is whether the attempt would even be made — historically, Elon tends to be more of a doubler-down than a fixer-up in the face of controversy. There’s also the concern that brand erosion and reputation damage during the platform’s emo period mean it’ll never fully regain the brand equity it’s lost. (I mean, that one’s pretty much a given.) The good news is that as long as people remain tweeting (through any application of the term) and haven’t started, like, Xing or whatever, the de-brand will be a lot simpler than a full re-rebrand.
And if anyone at Twitter were to ask my advice on their branding journey, which they totally might do someday, you don’t even know, I would encourage them to act sooner rather than later to undo what they’ve done. Every moment takes them further away from the branding Cmd+Z they really need, and also “X” is stupid and I hate it.
What do you think? Feel free to tweet (generic) your opinions at me — on X-formerly-known-as-Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Threads, below in comments, or whatever social media platform blows your skirt up. We don’t discriminate here when it comes to tweeting (generic), so by all means, tweet (generic) away.