The owner of Twitter seems to be struggling with engagement on his own platform, with Elon Musk’s latest dog-themed tweet showing just how desperate he is to drive up interaction from his followers.
The algorithm works in mysterious ways, and it turns out it can still be a real head-scratcher even for the CEO of the social site. Musk has struggled to engage with as much of his audience as he’d like, and it looks like he’s blaming his staff for his own failure. Last week he fired a Twitter engineer for basically telling him that Musk’s low engagement wasn’t due to the algorithm.
A childish move on Musk’s part, but then again, that’s nothing new for the SpaceX founder. Of course, Musk may be able to improve engagement if he hired a professional who knows what they are doing when it comes to algorithms. But then, how would he be able to tweet half of the cringey and weird things that he likes to force feed users?
So, hiring a professional is out of the question, which leaves the only option open being that Musk drives up interaction himself. Of course, that’s easier said than done, not much can break through the algorithm and guarantee such high levels of interaction, but there are some things on the internet that will always get a response.
No matter how old the internet is, some things just never change. A picture of a cute dog with a suit on, there’s not much else that always capture the hearts of your audience, although a cat wearing mittens would have also done the trick. Whilst the tweet is undoubtedly cute, it’s pretty obvious what Musk is doing; he’s tweeting things he knows will get him that sweet sweet engagement he craves so much.
To be fair, the tactic seems to be working for him as the first tweet featuring the cute doggo was retweeted over 35,000 times with almost 400,000 likes. Although the ruler of Twitter also suggested he would be making some “adjustments” to the algorithm, so maybe that could explain his sudden good luck.
Compared to last week, Musk’s engagement was a fraction of what it’s been. In fact, the Shiba worked so well that Musk decided to follow it up with another two pictures of the dog at his desk in different outfits. It seems like Elon’s struck gold with his latest tweet and he’s going to mine this comedic vein until there’s absolutely nothing left, and then he’ll probably follow it up by firing some more of his own staff. Just another hard day’s work for the king of Twitter.