For followers of Elon Musk, the last few months have been quite a ride. Before buying Twitter, the entrepreneur’s tweets had largely focused on his companies’ achievements. Videos showed the launch of SpaceX’s Falcon rockets, the expansion of Starlink satellite coverage and the release of new Tesla lines.
Scattered between those tweets were also plenty of standard memes, the occasional crypto reference, and the odd bit of political commentary. Since bouncing himself into buying the social media company though, Musk’s tweets have become more political more of the time. He’s posted tweets criticizing journalism and government policy, shared alt-right memes and he’s released reams of internal Twitter communications which he alleges prove political bias under the old management and a willingness to obey government instructions. Mostly what they showed was a company struggling to balance free speech principles with the need to battle misinformation and dangerous health advice during a pandemic.
The cost of Musk’s new forthrightness has been high. Between the end of October, when Musk took ownership of Twitter and started publishing more provocative tweets, and the end of the year, shares in his Tesla company fell more than 50 percent, wiping billions off the company’s value. No longer is Musk the world’s richest man, a title his tweets have surrendered to luxury goods seller Bernard Arnault. Tesla now looks set to have the worst performance of any major S&P company in 2022. Speech can be free but even the freest of speech can be very expensive indeed.
At the same time, though, Musk himself has become even more prominent than he was previously. His tweets, particularly those that focus on politics, can rack up tens of millions of views and more than ten thousand impressions. His contributions have always been important and noticed, especially when he was talking up dogecoin and bitcoin with all the enthusiasm of a crypto hodler. But his comments now appear in the mainstream news too. If high engagement and attention are signs of social media success, then Musk appears to be doing something right, even as he also irritates large numbers of people, builds up criticism and lowers his stock price.
Are there lessons here for budding entrepreneurs attempting to build a social media presence on Twitter? Should they be as aggressive and provocative as Musk, accepting criticism in return for higher engagement and a bigger profile? Or does the fall in his companies’ stock prices suggest a more restrained approach is also more profitable?
A new study in the Journal of Business Venturing attempts to provide an answer. Benedikt Seigner, a researcher at the University of Munich, together with colleagues in Germany, Austria and the United States examined the effects of provocative language, the status of new business ventures and the effect on audience engagement on social media.
New ventures, the researchers argue, have to communicate with their audiences to acquire the resources they need to survive their early years and to attract stakeholders. Tweeting is a necessity for entrepreneurs, not a luxury. Venture capitalists even monitor the social media performance of new companies to identify promising investment targets, they argue. The more attention a young company can attract, the greater its chances of landing investment funds.
But social media audiences are also known to engage with and pay attention to content designed to provoke a sharp emotional response, including from fake news and racist and sexist tweets.
“Provocative language likely helps new ventures stand out on social media because such language challenges and transgresses many people’s ‘values, norms or taboos that are habitually not challenged or transgressed,’” explain the researchers.
One example the study cites is a post that states: “Do you fight dirty? Yeah, fuck, yeah. Why Crossfit is so litigious.” The framing, the researchers argue, “is evidently more provocative and attention- grabbing than non-provocative reframing, such as ‘Let us explain the reasons behind Crossfit’s litigation.’”
The question though, is whether all attention, like all publicity, is good.
To find out how provocative tweets affect audiences, the researchers took a sample of around 369,000 tweets from 268 US-based, VC-backed internet ventures founded between 2011 and 2015 that were active on Twitter. They compared those tweets and the responses to them to a sample of just over 10,000 tweets posted by companies that had yet to receive venture capital funding. They looked at the language of the tweets, the funding status of the source, and the engagement the tweets generated.
“This sampling,” the researchers said, “allowed us to compare audience reactions to tweets by ventures that have varying statuses but that are otherwise relatively homogeneous.”
What the researchers found was that status matters. Ventures that had already attracted venture capital funding saw 159 percent more retweets and 279 percent more likes than ventures that had yet to attract funding.
And the language matters too.
“Provocative language in tweets negatively impacts audience engagement for tweets by low-status ventures (i.e., those without VC funding),” say the researchers, “and positively impacts audience engagement for tweets by high-status ventures (i.e., those with VC funding).”
Or to put it another way, tweeting like Elon works, but only for high status brands.
The Corporate Caste System
The difference between the statuses of different companies is relatively clear. Media coverage, university affiliations and connections with high-status regional clusters can all help a venture stand out from the crowd. But the clearest differences in status occur following what the researchers describe as a “consecrating event.”
For corporate ventures, VC funding represents that consecrating event because it’s the job of venture capitalists are to identify and develop the most promising young companies. Any company that has received VC funding has already received a badge of honor. Its tweets are worth noting.
More complex though is the nature of the language that’s likely to win engagement for high status ventures—or put people off when delivered by low status ventures. The researchers place provocative language in five categories: words expressing aggression; disobedience toward regulations; use of swear words; antagonism; and other types of norm challenging.
The most positive interaction for high status ventures came from tweets that were aggressive, that attacked regulations or that showed signs of antagonism. Those were the tweets that won the most likes and retweets. Swearing might win likes but picks up fewer retweets, and challenges to norms other than regulations made little difference to engagement levels.
So what do the findings mean for businesses hoping to win engagement through social media? What should a venture do as it tries to attract attention from audiences and potential investors?
The first thing to bear in mind is that status matters. Audiences don’t just look at the tweet before they retweet or like it; they also look at who sent it. Engaging with a provocative tweet from a high-status actor can increase an audience member’s visibility. Engaging with a provocative post from a low-status venture however brings only risk.
So ventures that have yet to receive VC funding should play it safe. Avoid swearing or railing at norms that seem to prevent them from achieving success. A company that’s yet to be funded hasn’t earned the right—let alone built the audience—to complain about the success of others. Only those who have already disrupted get to moan about the need to disrupt. Everyone else sounds like they’re just making excuses for their own lack of success.
You should also be more conciliatory than aggressive and more agreeable than antagonistic. The author Neil Gaiman has pointed out that writers can be good at what they do, agreeable, and on time. But they can only afford to lose one of those characteristics before editors stop wanting to work with them. The same might be said of companies, but a venture that has yet to receive VC funding hasn’t proved that it’s good at what it does. That means its tweets have to be both agreeable and accommodating.
And they should avoid swear words too.
Companies that have already won venture capital funding can afford to have a lot more fun. Because they’ve already shown that they’re important and skilled enough to win funding from venture capitalists, they can take more risks and benefit from the extra engagement that provocation wins on social media. Again, swearing and general complaints about norms that others have to follow are unlikely to win large amounts of retweets. But being willing to pick a fight, especially against rule-makers, should help to win plenty of engagement, raising the company’s profile and landing it more customers. A successful brand complaining about the rules that hold back other companies is much more sympathetic than a brand struggling against those rules.
There is an important caveat though. The study was submitted in a revised form in the last week of November, less than a month after Elon Musk had bought Twitter and before the decline in Tesla’s stock price was in full swing.
The researchers concluded that ventures attract audience engagement by tweeting like Elon only if they have high status like Elon. But if those tweets also give them a share price drop like Elon, they might want to stick to losing the engagement and dropping the memes.
Recent Comments