If you go on the internet and take a look at just about any nationally known American brand website, you will notice that you will not see any “X” social media icons.
Instead, what you are still seeing is the Twitter bird icon still on websites everywhere.
There is no X icon on the Coke [1] website. Not on the Ford [2] website. Not on the McDonald’s [3] website. Not on even on the Microsoft website [3]. Not anywhere. Companies are not embracing the new X brand.
But what about the media? How is the news media currently referring to the brand when writing about NewTwitter?
The Associated Press is calling them “X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.” That’s a mouthful. According to their updated stylebook [4] (a “stylebook” for the First Amendment? Seriously?!) they say that calling X “formerly known as Twitter” is acceptable as well as just calling it X or X platform.
No thanks. I’m a rebel. I will call them NewTwitter.
The New York Times [5]has even asked what everyone is supposed to call the updated Musk platform after the 52-year-old created mass confusion in the social media world.
According to the NYT, tweets are supposed to be called posts but I still see the word “tweets” on my NewTwitter home page. And the search bar still says “search Twitter.” You would think that Musk, who actually owns a space technologies company, would get his poop in a group and have the resources to get the NewTwitter site branded correctly before introducing the new name change to the world. But he didn’t, which I pointed out in a previous article [6]. Looking at his failure on this, would I ever want to be on one of his rocket ships or spacecrafts? Not in a million years.
So why aren’t companies like McDonald’s and Coke changing their social media icons on their websites? It’s most likely because companies don’t want to spend the time and money to change all of their marketing and advertising literature, social media pages and websites over to something that might be a passing fad.
There are many online who are saying that they don’t think that the new “X” thing is going to be permanent. I recently visited a Michigan Facebook group for people who own social media companies so I could see how they were handling things. One of the members asked, “So how is everybody handling the switch from Twitter to X? Have you rebranded your link icons, etc?”
Answers included calling it a “bizarre” rebranding and many said they planned to remove the app from their own company website entirely. One member said about switching their customer over, “Not yet but was contemplating this for current clients. I’m glad to see everyone is waiting for a larger brand rollout before switching any instances of the old logo.”
Many members of the Facebook group said they’ll be waiting to see if Elon alters the whole brand again in the future and are giving things time to shake out. One user said, “I have not yet and I haven’t had any clients request it. Once X is more universally adopted I will include it in my quarterly report to clients to see if they are ready to make the change.” Yet another member said, “Most clients are leaving, or at least pausing,Twitter and focusing on other channels…”
So while Musk might have the news media conforming to market his new brand, individuals and corporations aren’t sold on the idea yet.