Elon Musk’s temporary limit on how many posts Twitter users can read on the app could undermine and jeopardise the new CEO Linda Yaccarino’s effort to attract advertisers, according to marketing industry professionals.
Saturday Musk announced his plans regarding Twitter and that he is limiting how many tweets per day various accounts can read. He said that to “address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation,” Twitter has applied temporary limit.
Users posted screenshots in reply, showing they were unable to see any tweets, including tweets on the pages of corporate advertisers, after hitting the limit.
According to reports Yaccarino aims to repair the relationships with the advertisers who pulled aways from the platform after Musk took over last year, according to the Financial Times report.
The limits are “remarkably bad” for users and advertisers already shaken by the “chaos” Musk has brought to the platform, Mike Proulx, research director at Forrester, said on Sunday.
“The advertiser trust deficit that Linda Yaccarino needs to reverse just got even bigger. And it cannot be reversed based on her industry credibility alone,” he said.
According to Lou Paskalis, the founder of advertising consultancy AJL Advisory and former marketing boss at Bank of America, “This move signals to the marketplace that he’s not capable of empowering her to save him from himself.”
Olivia Wedderburn, an executive at creative agency TMW Unlimited, said she was advising her clients to “stop investing in Twitter immediately,” because the platform was turning away heavily engaged users, which she said is the “sole reason” to advertise on Twitter.
It looks like Musk will have to go back to the drawing board with the rate limit as it is a bad idea for Twitter as a business.
