Premium users on Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) platform will have a better scope of how audiences engage with their content after the social media giant unveiled an audience analytics capability.
In the new update, creators will get deeper insights about their audiences including aspects such as age, gender, country of residence as well as times of the day when followers are most actively engaging with content.
Influencers have hailed the development, noting that the insights will help them deliver targeted content on time and achieve the desired engagement.
“The new analytics dashboard is good and will be helpful to brands and creators. For quite a while one could only rely on third party analytics tools to understand their audience,” observes digital marketing strategist Egline Samoei.
“Creators and brands will now know when to post, informed by most active time insights, where their targets are based and their age. It could get better if X adds insights of what audience interests are," she adds.
The platform recently gained prominence in Kenya at the height of the youth-led uprising as it became the primary mobilisation tool via its unique features such as X Spaces.
Prior to that, however, its performance had deteriorated, emerging as the only social media platform whose potential advertising reach in the country dipped during the full year ended last December. This was following the radical policy and operational changes undertaken by Musk.
The Digital 2024 Report for Kenya, published in May this year by global digital insights platform Datareportal, showed that the potential audience that Kenyan marketers could reach with ads on X had declined by 26,000, or 1.4 percent, with analysts who spoke to the Business Daily at the time terming the Musk-led changes ‘unnecessary disruptions’.
The performance slump happened during a year when the ad reach of rival platforms rose significantly, with some rising as high as 41.1 percent year-on-year in the case of Meta-owned Facebook.
It also came at a time when Kenya’s annual digital advertising spending rose 8.8 percent year-on-year to hit a high of $108.4 million (Sh13.96 billion at current conversion rates), which was 24.6 percent of all advertising budgets by brands during the year.
Musk’s first major disruption on the platform after acquisition of ownership came in April last year when he announced a new verification policy that would compel users to pay monthly charges for authentication badges that were previously issued freely.
In the new policy, the Tesla boss sought to phase out the legacy blue badge and strip verified accounts off their authentication marks making the verification symbol available for purchase.
Fast forward to July, Mr Musk moved to rename the platform to X, dropping the signature blue bird logo and replacing it with a white 'X' on a black background, while announcing that the site would move into the provision of payments, banking as well as commerce services.
The platform, which was estimated to be enjoying around 200 million active users, started taking a hit as advertisers held back in protest against the new charges for previously free services, in addition to sustained technical hitches following Musk’s move to effect mass sackings at the firm.
Three months after taking control, Musk reported that X had lost at least half of its advertising revenue.
During the same month, Meta attempted to take on X by unveiling a rival platform dubbed Threads which hit the ground running after it amassed a record 100 million users just five days after launch.
Within weeks of the Meta unveil, industry reports indicated that Threads attracted one-fifth of the weekly active user base of X.
Threads however proved a flop shortly thereafter with analytics firms reporting that the platform’s daily active users had dropped by over 80 percent as at the beginning of August which was less than a month after inception.
In seeking to step up his battle for audiences against rivals, Musk unveiled an advertising revenue-sharing programme that would see creators earn monthly incomes based on content impressions.
