For those of you who don’t follow Linette Lopez, I encourage you to do so. The articles she writes for Insider always have a degree of bared fangs and sharp claws mingled with humor and facts.
This article reinforces much of what I wrote would happen to Twitter in several posts on LinkedIn. I’m a fan of Elon Musk because of what he created with Tesla and SpaceX. However, when it came to the acquisition of Twitter, I made it clear that Musk isn’t King Midas – everything Musk touches won’t turn into gold.
A truism in business is that when a company makes an acquisition with the intent of improving operations or technology, it opens the door for competitors to quickly release their version of a competing product or service. This is what we are witnessing with Threads from Meta. Had Musk not acquired Twitter, Threads may never have become a product. Threads is popular based on the number of downloads but usage is the only thing that matters. I’m curious to see what the number of users turns out to be in 90 days and beyond.
What surprises me about all of the talk about Twitter and Threads is that it fails to take into account the possibility of another Twitter Killer app being released by someone else. In my opinion, the “someone else” will be TikTok.
TikTok has been downloaded over 3B times and the company has over 1B active monthly users worldwide. TikTok is investing heavily in TikTok Shop, its e-commerce platform, and behind the scenes, has partnered with multiple 3rd parties to provide TikTok Shop customers with order fulfillment and delivery.
Whenever I was asked who I thought could beat Amazon, I always named the same company – Facebook. Why? Because of the integration of social media and commerce. The ability of a Facebook user to order retail products from their user page and immediately share the purchase and receipt of products on social media, would give Facebook an advantage over traditional retailers and Amazon. Facebook, however, never took advantage of the opportunity. Who did? TikTok. Stated another way, TikTok is the company that I thought Facebook should have become.
If I’m correct and TikTok eventually releases their version of a public forum app, it will be just one more example of how TikTok crushes all assumptions about what they can or can’t do and how they Think BIG as a company.
Twitter is OK. Threads is neat. I believe what TikTok has in mind will be revolutionary with a lot more media including algorithm-driven news presented in a variety of ways based on the desire of users. TikTok must attract and keep users glued to the app. A capability similar to Twitter and Threads makes perfect sense.
As for Musk and Twitter…I stated that Twitter will be unable to live up to Musk’s expectations for one reason – resistance to Elon Musk. So far, I’ve been proven right. When more people are against you than supporting you, success is rarely achieved.
