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- Every brand should pay for X Premium+
Every brand should pay for X Premium+
Paid verification, Reply Prioritization, and Tweet Editing are just worth it.
Jack Appleby
July 31, 2024
So many cool things are happening right now. I’m headed to LA next week for a special event with my fav NBA team (go Clips), then up to SF to play in the Warriors 3×3 tourney, followed by DC for the White House Creator Economy Conference?! Plus a brand partnership with TaskRabbit that’s letting me give creative marketers $1,000?!?!
Forever thankful for everyone who reads Future Social—you’ve changed my life over and over again.
Let’s get to the social, though. This week you’ll read about:
Why every brand should pay for Twitter, err, X Premium +
The Kamala Harris “Brat Summer” strategy
TikTok’s new custom thumbnail feature
You can win $1,000 by submitting remixed lyrics for TaskRabbit’s new ad campaign!
I wrote about TaskRabbit’s Lyrics Campaign a few months ago after that Lil’ Jon "TO THE WINDOWWW, TO THE WALL” ad popped in my feed (see above). I love the way they’re using remixed song lyrics to catch your eye—just such simple & smirky social media content.
Now the brand’s running a contest to find new remixed lyrics where you could win $1,000, get your submission featured in their OOH, and *drum roll* I’m one of the judges!
Here’s how it works:
Pick a TaskRabbit service category like cleaning, moving, painting, furniture assembly, etc
Find a clever way to remix lyrics to your favorite song to cleverly play off a TaskRabbity task
A few of my ridiculous submissions:
Sugar, we’re going down sweeping
I tried so hard, and got so far, but in the end, it doesn’t even lather
You can find me in the tub, bottle full of bub’
Go get your Weird Al on fast—the contest is only open another 36 hours or so! I’m far too excited to read your ideas—easily one of the most fun partnerships I’ve worked on.
Contest ends 8/1/2024 at 11:59 pm PST. Open to US residents only. Must be 18 years of age or older. Winners will be chosen on 8/2/2024 and notified via email. To claim prize, Winner must release rights to Submission.
Remember when Elon demanded you start paying for your Blue Checkmarks on Twitter? That program’s gone through a wholeee lot of evolutions since the Twitter Blue days of 2022.
Twitter Blue became X Blue, then X Premium. Then X Premium split into three tiers: X Basic, X Premium, and X Premium+.
And while I know many companies scoffed at paying for checkmarks and features after tweeting free all these years, your brand really should pay for X Premium+.
Lemme update you on the new offering + my thinking.
Every X tier is priced different. I believe your brand should grab X Premium+, which goes for $16/month or $168/year. That subscription will get you:
Blue Checkmark: your followers will know it’s really you
Reply Prioritization: Verified account replies appear higher in a tweet’s reply list than non-verified account replies.
Post Editing: edit your tweets for up to 1 hour after posting
Longer Posts: tweet character count increased to 25,000
Longer Video Uploads: can publish up to 3 hour videos
Access to Media Studio: manage your images / videos with studio.x.com
Access to X Pro (formerly TweetDeck)
Access to Articles: Twitter’s new long-form written article format, similar to LinkedIn articles
There are a handful of other features as well, but these are the big ones for your brand. Here’s the full list for the curious.
The $3/month X Basic tier is pretty bare bones and doesn’t come with the blue checkmark, which I think you need.
The $8/month X Premium Tier is 95% of what you need, but the $16 / month X Premium+ Tier comes with the “largest reply prioritization,” which is undefined, but if our job’s to get the most views on content and replies alike, springing an extra $8/month seems worth it.
So, X Premium+ it is. Let me get into the why, though.
When your customers come across your business on a social app, anything you can do to prove you’re the official brand page is worth doing, and the blue checkmark is still the best identifier. Culturally, the blue checkmark still means you’re who you say you are, even if rando Twitter anons can get their own.
You’re gonna use Tweet Editing.
When I worked as a valet in college, it wasn’t if one of us was gonna eventually scratch a car—it was when. When you’re parking thousands and thousands of cars, it’s just a numbers game.
The same goes for misspellings in tweets. I remember when Nintendo accidentally tweeted #WiggerWednesday, missing the L from their adorable Wiggler characters. You bet they wish they could’ve quickly edited that tweet.
Fingers crossed when your typo happens it’s not problematic, but you’re definitely gonna want to just edit the tweet instead of deleting & losing all the engagement you earned.
Reply Prioritization is pretty valuable.
Next to the blue checkmark, this might be the most valuable feature X Premium+ offers. I know all you Community Managers love to get involved with viral tweets or brand-on-brand interactions—Reply Prioritization means your reply is at the top of the list when people scroll who’s chatting back. It’s essentially a paid upvote. Paid reach at an extremely low cost.
$168/year is so cheap, any brand can afford that.
I remember when I wrote about Twitter Blue during it’s original launch. AdQuick VP of Marketing Adam Singer chimed in:
Yeahyeahyeah, I know, the other networks are essentially free, but if $168/year for an essential communication platform breaks your business’s back… uh… I’m got questions about your company’s viability. This is as no brainer of a business expense as it gets.
Yes, get it even if your brand doesn’t tweet anymore.
Handfuls of brands have abandoned the nest for Elon’s reign, choosing not to post organic or paid content on the platform anymore. Even if you’ve gone that route, I still think you should grab X Premium+.
It’s still worth having a profile on Twitter in case your customers come looking for you, and you can still direct them to your website or other social networks if you’re not tweeting these days.
What about the Gold Checkmark and X Verified Organizations?
You may remember Twitter also offers a Gold Checkmark for a hysterical $1,000 a month for businesses. 99% of companies don’t need it—the blue checkmark is justttt fine. I wrote about the product last year & which use cases could justify it.
Should you still like being on Twitter?
I mean, I don’t, but that doesn’t seem to stop me for whatever reason.
There are so many social big thinkers out there, writing all kinds of amazing strategies, analysis, and breakdowns. All ships rise with the tide, so here are a few reads from other places I think you could learn from.
Naming a new candidate just 100 days before the election automatically makes this the most ambitious U.S. marketing campaign of all-time, and it’s kicked off with memes. Read about how the Harris campaign is using the interwebs.
The guys who interview every major YouTuber dropped this crash course on YouTube. It’s an important watch for understanding how to build on the platform.
It’s rare that TikTok lags behind Instagram Reels on a feature, but they’ve finally added a custom thumbnail option for all TikToks. Surely you’ve heard YouTubers yell about the importance of proper thumbnails—it’s just as true on TikTok.
Social Cues