Share this article

Elon Musk bought Twitter at approximately $44 billion on October 27, 2022.Given Mr. Musk’s strong reputation of entrepreneurship, it was perfectly predictable that he invested such huge sums of money in Twitter with a chief objective of making it a commercially profitable social medium for himself.

In the initial efforts to make Twitter profitable, Elon scrapped free Legacy Verification. For one to have a blue tick on their account now, one has to subscribe to Twitter Blue by paying $8. For as long as the subscription is in progress, the subscriber continues to pay $8 per month until they opt to unsubscribe.

As an entrepreneur of shrewdness, Elon Musk has sought to incentivize subscription to Twitter Blue and disincentivize normal accounts. He started by permitting Twitter Blue subscribers to write longer tweets than those on normal Twitter — they can compose tweets of up-to 25,000 characters, 89 times more characters than those on normal Twitter (280 characters). Among other prerogatives, an edit button is exclusive to Blue subscribers.

In his continuous efforts to incentivize subscription to Twitter Blue, Musk has now limited normal accounts to reading only 800 tweets per day and Blue subscribers to 10 times more tweets across the same period — 8,000 tweets! Although Twitter is not clear on what counts as a read tweet, my supposition is that a read tweet is synonymous to a viewed tweet.

According to Twitter, “Anyone who is logged into Twitter who views a Tweet count as a view, regardless of where they see the Tweet (e.g. Home, Search, Profiles, etc.) or whether or not they follow the author. If you’re the author, looking at your own Tweet also counts as a view.”

That, logically, means that whatever tweet we view, is counted as a read tweet.

Elon Musk being a wily entrepreneur, he has presented a compelling justification for grossly reducing the number of tweets read by tweeps per day “controlling the extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation from Artificial Intelligence (AI) companies.”

Certainly, this new development from Twitter has local and international implications since the platform is globally used. In the moment, I am more concerned with local implications than international ones.

In Uganda, the social media influencing industry which is dominated by youth has been in its formative stages but steadily progressing. It has not been impossible for an individual or a team of about three influencers to attract a social media influencing gig that pays Shs 500,000 per week.

Given the unemployment rates in Uganda, social media influencing had made up for many unavailable job opportunities for youth since starting out as an influencer requires very limited capital a smartphone, data and social capital in form of follower-ship are enough to get you going.

Now that a staggering majority of Twitter accounts by Ugandans are unverified, and that the same accounts are restricted to only reading 800 tweets per day, it suggests that the reach of social media influencers is drastically curtailed.

For any influencer to reach many people which could mean hitting one’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) now, they have to put the timing of their influencing tweets into much consideration.

The logical assumption is that by early morning, most accounts have read the least number of tweets. So, it would be wise for any social media influencer to tweet in the early morning hours for their tweets to stand a high chance of being read.

Failure to tweet in the early morning hours means standing a high risk of not hitting your KPIs (which are almost always engagement related) most especially if your temporary employer has set them highly.

But even when you tweet very early in the morning, it appears that there is now a low threshold beyond which influencing may not be possible. It’s no longer possible to attract the same highest levels of engagement within the same period of time in the rate-limit era on Twitter.

If your tweet could attract 1,000 likes in 24 hours in the pre-rate limit era, it’s logically impossible to attract the same likes across the same period of time if the set of conditions (followers, attractiveness of your tweet etc.) is constant in the rate-limit era.