The former president risks cannibalizing his own social media platform if he starts regularly posting to X/Twitter, marketing experts say.
Former President Donald Trump made his long-awaited return to Twitter/X on Monday night in a glitchy, three-hour livestreamed conversation with that platform’s new owner, Elon Musk.
The same day, shares in Truth Social, the rival social platform partly owned by Trump himself, dropped 5%. The stock is down nearly 60% so far this year, mainly over questions of its scant revenue. Last week, the company’s quarterly earnings report revealed that revenues had dropped 30% percent to $836,900 from a year earlier, with a total loss of $16.4 million during the quarter.
But part of the stock’s recent skid may also reflect investor concerns that, if the former president returns to regularly posting on the site now known as X, it may spell trouble for Truth Social, where Trump remains the main event.
“I think it makes sense for Trump to maintain both [accounts]. If he wants to reach more voters, he’s better off doing that with a larger platform”, Eric Dahan, the founder of marketing firm Mighty Joy, told Newsweek. “It’s not one or the other, and it doesn’t have to be one or the other.”
Trump has long been known for his prolific tweeting, which he started as one of Twitter’s early celebrity adopters and kept going through his term in the White House. He would push the limits on the social media platform, with around 26,000 tweets during his presidency — from the innocuous misspellings to sudden threats of nuclear war.
