Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, indicated on Sunday that he plans to steer the social media platform in a fresh direction, unveiling a rebranding strategy that will see the iconic blue bird logo replaced with an X. This announcement comes as Musk acknowledges a sluggish return of advertisers to the platform.
Although the rebranding was not yet visible on the website by Sunday evening, it follows Musk’s recent disclosure that advertising revenue has plunged to nearly half of its former levels. Additionally, the company’s cash flow remains in the negative, dragging down by both the lack of ad revenue and existing debt obligations.
Mike Proulx, research director at Forrester, commented that this shift might further alienate the site’s original and previously devoted user base. He noted, “On the one hand, you can make the argument he would be getting rid of an iconic brand. On the other hand, he is signalling it is a new day for what was once Twitter and that the company is heading in a different direction with a different user base.”
In a Sunday post, Musk expressed his intentions to transform Twitter’s visual identity and solicited feedback from his millions of followers on whether to alter the platform’s color scheme from blue to black. He shared an image featuring a stylized X against a cosmic black backdrop.
Change default platform color to black
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 23, 2023
Musk added, “And soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.”
Later in the day, Twitter’s CEO Linda Yaccarino tweeted, “It’s an exceptionally rare thing – in life or in business – that you get a second chance to make another big impression. Twitter made one massive impression and changed the way we communicate. Now, X will go further, transforming the global town square.”
Since Musk’s acquisition of Twitter last October, the company has officially rebranded itself to X Corp. This marks a shift in alignment with Musk’s aspiration to develop a “super app” similar to China’s WeChat.
In April, Twitter’s traditional blue bird logo was briefly substituted by an image of Dogecoin’s Shiba Inu dog, which resulted in a significant increase in the cryptocurrency’s market value.
The platform faced backlash from users and marketing experts earlier this month when Musk declared new restrictions on the number of tweets accounts could engage with daily. This change contributed to an uptick in popularity for Threads, a competing service owned by Meta Platforms, which garnered over 100 million sign-ups within five days of its July 5 launch.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
