Twitter Is Called Something Else Now

What happened

The platform announced over the weekend that it was dropping the Twitter name and branding, and the logo on the site changed this morning.

It is now X (formerly Twitter), with the bird replaced by a single letter.

The old web address continues to work and redirects, so nothing anybody has linked to has broken.

The rest of the change, including the language used for posts and the app listings, is being rolled out over the following weeks rather than all at once.

What has not changed

• Your handle.
• Your followers.
• Links you have published.
• How the platform works.
• Whether it produces enquiries.

The last is the one that matters. A rebrand changes what something is called and not whether it was doing anything for your business, and for most small trades the honest answer to that was already no.

The practical task is an icon

Which is the whole of the work for a small business.

Wherever the old bird logo appears on your site, in your footer, in an email signature, or on printed material, it is now out of date.

The website is the one worth doing this week, since a dated logo in a footer is a small signal that nothing has been touched in a while.

Printed material can wait until it is reprinted anyway, and replacing stock over a logo change is not a good use of money.

Email signatures are usually one template and take a few minutes.

That is genuinely the extent of it.

A worked example

A business spent an hour on Monday reading coverage and discussing whether the change affected their strategy.

They had four hundred followers there, had posted eleven times in two years, and had never had an enquiry from it.

The correct amount of attention was the ten minutes it took to swap the icon in their footer.

The hour would have been better spent on the review request they had been meaning to send.

They swapped the icon, added a note to check the printed material at the next reprint, and moved on.

Nothing else about their business was affected in any way.

Do not update what you cannot see

A practical caution, since the icon appears in more places than people expect.

The footer, the contact page, any share buttons, the email signature template, and occasionally a sidebar or a header.

Search your own site for the old logo file name, which finds the ones you have forgotten.

Do the same in whatever produces your invoices and quotes, since those templates are frequently older than the website.

That sweep is the subject of the next few days and it applies to more than one platform.

Whether to keep the account at all

Which is a better question than how to react to a rename.

The rebrand is a reasonable prompt to ask whether the account has ever done anything, since you are opening the settings anyway.

If it has produced nothing in two years, the honest treatment is the one applied to any dormant profile: fix the description, point it at your site, and stop.

Do not delete it, since the handle and the search result for your name are both worth keeping.

And do not make a decision about it this week specifically, since a decision made during a news cycle is a decision made for the wrong reason.

Expect people to ask

Since it has been widely covered.

Somebody will ask whether this affects your business, and the answer is a sentence: the platform changed its name and nothing about how we work has changed.

That is more reassuring than a considered explanation and it is entirely true.

Where a customer asks how to find you there, give them the handle, which is unchanged.

Both addresses continue to work, so anything you have printed still functions.

What it signals, cautiously

Stated as speculation because that is what it is.

A rebrand of a well-established name usually indicates an intention to change what the product is rather than only what it is called.

Whether that produces something more useful or less for a small business is not knowable this week and possibly not this year.

Which argues for watching rather than acting, on the same terms as everything else this year.

Set a note for January and get on with the work in front of you.

The businesses that spent this week reacting will have nothing to show for it, and the ones that swapped an icon will be in the same position.

Watch for impersonation in the confusion

Which is the one genuine risk a rename creates for a small business.

A period where everybody is uncertain what the official branding looks like is exactly when a message claiming to be from the platform is most likely to be believed.

Expect messages about verifying your account, migrating to the new branding, or confirming your handle, and treat all of them as false.

The platform does not ask for passwords by message, and nothing about a name change requires you to confirm anything.

Tell whoever else has access to the account the same thing this week rather than after somebody has clicked something.

The counter-case

Some businesses are affected more.

Anybody who built a real audience there has a genuine question about whether the changes accompanying a rebrand will affect their reach.

Businesses whose customers are journalists, technology people, or a national rather than local audience have more at stake than a local trade.

And organisations with a great deal of printed material carrying the old logo have a real cost, spread over time as stock gets replaced.

Swap the icon on your site this week, note the printed material for the next reprint, and change nothing else.

This week

1. Swap the icon in your footer.
2. Check the contact page.
3. Update the email signature.
4. Search for the old logo file.
5. Check invoice templates.
6. Note printed material for reprinting.
7. Change nothing else.

Step seven is the instruction, since the coverage this week will suggest a response is required and for a local trade there is nothing to respond to.

Holding your name across platforms is covered in claiming a handle you will not use.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.