By Jay Bemis | Advertising Systems Inc.
President-elect Donald Trump’s tapping of billionaire entrepreneur and supporter Elon Musk to lead a Department of Government Efficiency has left some in the political world atwitter, if you will.
Marketers and advertisers, for example, are wondering what the appointment might mean for Musk’s social platform, X.
X, formerly known as Twitter, is expected see its number of users worldwide decrease by 2.7% to 349.1 million next year, according to an eMarketer forecast issued this past spring. And since Trump’s election on Nov. 5, that user base has dropped even more, with a newer alternative platform, Bluesky, gaining a million users in the week following the election to reach 15 million users.
But those 15 million, arising from election-year discord, are minuscule compared to X’s still nearly 350 million users, and then you can add Musk’s 200 million social-media followers and the $200 million he contributed to Trump’s campaign to the equation.
After Musk took over Twitter and rebranded the platform to X, its worldwide ad revenues have been slashed in half, from $4.14 billion the year Musk took over in 2022 to $2 billion in 2023, per eMarketer. It’s forecasting that those declines will continue through 2026, but it also notes that the re-election of Trump could well change how some marketers and advertisers think about the platform.
It’s as if marketers, X users and advertisers all seem to be asking the same question that The Clash, a British punk-rock band, popularly posed in its 1981 hit tune, “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”
What Marketers Might Mull While Weighing X
The experts at eMarketer say advertisers may return to “or remain on” X simply to demonstrate goodwill to the efficiency-minded Musk. Such brands as IBM, Comcast, Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney already have returned to the platform, according to a Fortune report.
“These companies face government scrutiny and could benefit from having allies close to President Trump,” eMarketer notes.
Also of note, it says, are these social-marketing factors:
- X users “aren’t necessarily in a shopping mindset.” Only 16% of social-media users worldwide use the platform for product discovery, compared with 61% who use Instagram and 60% who use Facebook, according to data eMarketer cited from Sprout Social and Cint.
- A mere 5.5% of marketers worldwide use X for influencer campaigns. That’s compared to 58.9% who use TikTok and 35.2% who use Instagram (per Influencer Marketing Hub).
- X will capture just 0.2% of worldwide digital ad spend in 2025, per eMarketer’s forecast from this past spring. Facebook, meanwhile, will pull in 14.6% of that ad spend and TikTok/Douyin will snare 7.1%.
“The problem Twitter has faced now, and even well before Musk took over, is that it was never a very high-performing social channel for brands,” Keith Bendes, a vice president of strategy at influencer marketer Linqia, tells eMarketer.
“ … Brands will go where the performance is, so unless Musk can improve the media metrics for advertisers they will never have incentive to make Twitter a significant part of their media strategy.”
Offers eMarketer, in its own Clash-like, “stay-or-go” sort of summation:
“Because X’s leadership is now so closely intertwined with the Trump administration, brands will have to decide whether staying or leaving the platform aligns with their own brand identity. Those seeking to appear neutral will either abstain from changing their current strategy or will quietly return to advertising with the platform.
“But it’s unlikely ad spend will return to where it once was.”
