The Evolution Continues: X's Latest Updates

X formally known as(fka)Twitter(which throughout this article will be referred to as X, unless when needed) has in recent times seen a considerable amount of changes.


The very first change which initiated all other changes was the change in power when Billionaire Business Tycoon, Elon Musk, officially made an all cash purchase of the microblogging platform on the 17th of October 2022 after finalising the necessary procedures that began when he made his intention of purchasing the company known in April of that same year.


It's worthy to note that the total cost it took Musk to purchase the company is $44B.


After the acquisition of X, it was made a private company and merged with X corp which is to become its new parent company.


The changes began right inside the company after Elon Musk fired X's top executives including the former CEO, Parag Agrawal and made many others resign as a result of his new policies.



During the past one year, X fka Twitter had seen tremendous changes, and in this article, we'd be reviewing all of these changes and the impacts they've had on X.



But, before then, let's look quickly at why X made such updates.


X as a company is already established, they have a large user base and are regarded as one of the most popular internet platforms.


But, the need to continuously improve and evolve is one aspect that even the greatest tech empire don't take for granted, else they'd soon be replaced as the competition is fierce.


It is this need to evolve and retain their top position in the industry that promoted Elon Musk to change how things were done at X.


Introduction To X's Core Features And Its Effect On The Social Media Landscape.


One thing that sets X apart is the ability to make short posts called tweets, follow up tweets with tweets and increase the reach of a tweet by retweeting. With how the platform is structured, one can go viral even with little followers.


When Musk took over, he made it clear that new changes will come to X and overtime, these updates, many of which are peculiar to X alone, have been rolled out one after the other.


Below are the new updates, how they've affected the platform, and what might have promoted it.

√ Paid Verification Check:


In every social media platform, the verification check or badge which is mostly blue in colour except for some accounts, usually that of organisations.


The verification is to help social media users identify the authenticity of accounts, especially accounts associated with public figures and popular individuals, this is to help curtail the problem of scams and identity theft, but, getting your account verified involves a process of verifying one's real identity which is free, but this year, Elon Musk made it mandatory that all verified users will have to pay a subscription of $8 a month and anyone who intends to get verified must pay that stipulated amount. X accounts that didn't comply with that directive had their badge removed immediately, but some very popular accounts later got their verification back without paying, if they later paid, no one announced it.


This new innovation caused an increase in the number of X verified accounts. However, this update caused many creators to leave the platform to other competitors.


Why did Musk do this? According to CNBC, Elon Musk told the public that the reason he implemented paid verification is to reduce the influx of bots on the platform, how exactly he hopes this will address the issue isn't much known, but these bots have reduced drastically on X.



√ Editing Of Tweets:


With the introduction of paid verification, Elon Musk commenced giving X verified users premium feelings and one of such features of the ability to edit tweets.


This came as good news to many X users and even prompted many to get the verification badge since it came with benefits.


Before this feature was implemented, a mistake identified late in a tweet is either left that way or the entire tweet deleted and this worried many X users.

However, this editing feature still has a limitation, after one hour of tweeting, one can't edit the tweet again, this was increased from the former 30 mins editing time period.


One reason why this feature was implemented was because of another feature which we'd analyse below.


Though, some X users have complained that editing a post affects the impressions, but this hasn't been verified by X.



√ Lengthy Text:


Yet, another feature that was made accessible to only verified users. Previously, the amount of permissible characters in a tweet was 280 characters, but after Musk took over, he increased it to 10000 characters for verified users and now it's at 25000 characters with support for font formatting and styling.


This feature increased expression of thoughts and enabled creators on X to effectively pass their message and sell their products right there on the platform. According to Musk, X will be a great platform for journalism.


Comparing it with the previous character limit and its effect on the platform, this particular update came with its good side, which we discussed above and its bad side.

The bad side being that X's algorithm favours threads and during the when X had a very limited character limit, many tweets were turned into threads that ultimately led to greater reach. Though, we've also observed that despite the verified users using longer texts, they still get more reach than unverified users. It could be that the algorithm had been modified to promote contents of verified users by displaying them more on the for you page.

√ Enhanced Video Length and Ability to Incorporate Video Calls into X:


Slowly, the microblogging platform is being transformed into a multifaceted platform for every social media needs.

Already, videos on X for verified users are getting more video time length of up to 2 hours, but a recent announcement from the billionaire owner of X revealed that more features are coming including the ability to make calls right on the app without a phone number requirement.


Though, the video aspect still lacks in many areas, it's not engaging like a reel, can't be saved to device and can't be remixed, but we believe that Musk will do something regarding any or all of these features.

√ Payments Of Verified Creators:


In August this year, many woke up to get credit alerts from X.


This was coming after X's relevance was threatened by the launch of Threads: An app by Instagram, a Meta owned company and X's long rival. Some of Musk's policies didn't sit well with some creators and they left for other platforms which prompted the rise of the Threads App, a platform that has very similar characteristics with X.


After the payout, many of the runaway creators returned and started off from where they stopped.


These payouts ran in millions of naira and these are the criteria for getting it.

√ Be over 18 years of age.

√ Have an X's blue badge.

√ Have a minimum of 500 followers.

√ Be active and have generated over 5 million impressions in the last 30 days. Previously it was 15 million impressions.


Also, the amount of followers one has and most importantly the active engagements and impressions of one's post determines how much one will receive.


What was the result? There was a surge in the amount of active engagements on the platform and many people who refused to get the X verified badge had gotten theirs. This increase in engagements doesn't seem to be declining as at the time of writing this article, after all, another round of money is coming.


Of all the updates that have been implemented on the platform, this seems to be the loudest due to the financial gain associated with it.

√ Rebranding:


In August of this year, the social media platform changed both its name and official logo from Twitter to X, and from the bird to a bold X logo, the name and logo wasn't the only thing that changed, the official site of the platform had a redirect from twitter.com to x.com.




The last time a popular social media platform had a brand change was in late 2021 when Facebook Inc switched to Meta Inc as the official parent company. This could be a similar thing that has happened to X as the parent company of the platform is X corp.


This generated mixed reactions from internet users, but since this update came alongside that of creators payment, there wasn't a significant reduction in the amount of traffic on the platform.


This name change also reflected X's position as a leading internet platform when iOS, which normally doesn't allow Apps to use a single character as an app name, made an exception for X.


Aside from these updates, X users witnessed updates on privacy, which has been subject to controversies, transparency with impressions and the removal of the type of device a tweet was made from, Elon in a tweet announcing the removal, tweeted that it's an irrelevant feature and consumes extra lines of code.



Other updates that came to the platform include:

Ability of users subscribed to the verification also known as Xblue to hide their verification checkmarks.


Unverified users were limited to viewing 600 tweets a day, newcomers were limited to 300 tweets per day while verified users viewed up to 6000, but again, an increment was made to it, unverified newcomers now have 500 tweets viewing limit, 1000 for unverified old users and 10K for verified users.


Verified users are now shown less ads. This isn't new as X is now subscription based and such is common with subscription based platforms.




Overall, these updates have sparked discussions and increased X's traffic by leading more advertisers to prioritise the platform.


Elon Musk is known as a good strategist, he's successfully built great companies and he doesn't give up easily.


He's made it known that his intention is to save the platform from spams and bots, and indeed, there's been a reduction of these from the platform.




In the area of performance, Twitter has seen some growth which some experts like Business Insider say is temporary.


In July of this year, Musk said that the average number of monthly users have increased.


The platform's valuation has increased by 8% in July according to Fidelity.


However, issues of misinformation and intentional restrictions of certain contents have also been raised.


In spite of the challenges X is currently facing, Elon Musk strongly believes that the platform will become a trillion dollar company and he's been making arrangements to bring back what X has lost and gain much more, an example is the payment of verified users from ad revenues.


X has literally been torn in halves with one side being in support of Musk and his new policies while others desiring the old Twitter.




While we anticipate more updates as Musk has promised, we can't deny that a new blessing has come to X and its users.


X as a platform can be leveraged to reach more people, advertisers are now embracing the platform as its new updates are very favourable when it comes to reaching a wide audience.


At Kustomers, we recommend using X and embracing its features. The platform's future is very promising and at the same time, rewarding.





In summary, the advent of longer texts and videos, incorporation of video calls, paid verification/subscription and earnings has commenced the dawn of a new era of social media.


Though, it comes with its drawbacks which is harsh on unsubscribed users, X's evolution is very much futuristic.





For every platform on the internet to survive, rebranding and pivoting is necessary, and under the leadership of Elon Musk, the CTO and his CEO, (), X is currently going through its own and we look forward to how its end result will be.


You can try out these new updates and share with us of your experiences via the comments.



References:


Majority of the references on this article was sourced from X, Elon Musk's profile and media platforms like Forbes and Aljazeera.