The podcast debuted a bit early, because I wanted to discuss whether we should ditch X/Twitter if it becomes a site you can only use if you pay.
Listen now or read the transcript below.
Transcript
Hello, and welcome to the CU Social Strategy Podcast. This is your host, Jennifer Roland Cadiente.
I have been doing social media for credit unions, in particular, for over a decade now. And I started this podcast to help other credit union marketers make the most of their time on social media to be most effective for the credit union.
This is episode one, which is very exciting.
I wanted to start by talking about one of the big topics du jour and that’s whether you should stay on X, formerly known as Twitter, if they switch to a pay model.
Now we don’t know for sure if they’re actually going to go to a model where every user has to pay. Elon Musk has talked a lot about it as a potential way to lower the number of bots on the site. And personally, I’ve never really had problems with bots on the site. I don’t find that bots are interacting with my clients’ accounts, I don’t find that they’re interacting with my accounts a lot.
I know that people who are using Twitter more for personal use instead of for business use probably do experience more issues with bots tweeting out, you know, inappropriate content, non factual content, but I haven’t really found that it affects my clients or my businesses very much at all.
So my advice would be to use the analytics to see if X or Twitter remains effective for you, if they do switch to a pay model. And this really is, you know, it’s something that’s important to do on a periodic basis anyway.
You can use the native analytics that are within Twitter to see you know, how many people are interacting with your posts, what types of posts are most engaging, things like that. And just look at the data now and capture it in a way that is effective for you and the other members of your team to see if it’s useful for you.
Then, if they do switch to a pay model, and you choose to pay the monthly subscription fee — it doesn’t sound like it’s going to be a particularly onerous fee, you know, considering all of the other subscriptions and tools that we’re using to connect with members. But we still don’t want to be paying for something that’s not useful. So take your analytics now.
If they do switch to pay model, and look at your analytics, then see if you know interaction is changing for you.
You know, if bots had been a problem for you, you could find that a bot-free Twitter is actually more effective for you. More people will be seeing your posts instead of bot posts. People may be less likely to block and mute things that you’re talking about if there’s less bot activity. So it could actually end up being a net positive for you and for your credit union.
If you’re using another tool, such as SocialPilot, HootSuite, or Buffer to schedule your tweets, then you can look at the analytics within that. I sometimes find those aggregate tools a little bit easier to use, because you can compare it across the other social media accounts that you’re managing.
So we’ll all just keep watching the news, watching our email inboxes to see if X or Twitter switches to a paid model for all users. And if so then we’ll all just keep looking at our analytics to see if it’s really an effective place for us to be.
Alright, well thank you for joining me for this first episode of the CU social strategy podcast.
Make sure that you click the subscribe button in your favorite podcast app so that you get notified whenever a new episode goes live. And as we get more episodes under our belt here, let me know if you’d like to be featured on the podcast. Let me know if you have any questions that you’d like me to answer on the podcast.
We’re going to be bringing in social media professionals credit union professionals to talk about what they’re doing successfully so that we can all be using our social media tools to their best advantage.
And if you liked what you heard today and are looking forward to hearing more, feel free to leave a review in your favorite podcast app that helps others find us and share this with other credit union marketers who you think might be interested.
Thank you, and I’ll be talking again to you soon