Dr Beth Montague-Hellen, CILIP LGBTQ+ Network Incoming Chair, writes how Elon Musk should have thought about searchability when choosing a new brand for Twitter

Twitter’s billionaire CEO owner doesn’t take many things so seriously, so its no surprise he didn’t take searchability into account when he decided to rebrand the social media platform as the letter ‘X’.

Musk’s ‘X’ rebrand of Twitter has already fallen foul of one of the classic pitfalls in branding, failing to think about searchability – how easy it is to find your product in the mass of information available on the internet.

Currently a google search for X sets the social network up against several films, a movie production company, a technology company, and a rock band from the USA, and that’s just the first page of results.

A brand named ‘X’ will also cause problems when searching documents, files and databases.

A search for the letter X will bring up every word containing it – let us hope you’re not interested in how Twitter discusses xylophones or X-rays.

You can add in white space characters either side to improve matters, but does everyone really have to become an expert in regular expression searching because the CEO fancies a change of logo?

Twitter has traditionally been a place of networking, campaigning, and sharing news for many years, and has been the social media home of many librarians.

Particularly useful during lockdowns, Twitter allowed librarians to stay in touch with their patrons, and make a name for their libraries through the platform, see Orkney Library as an example.

Twitter also helped raise the profile of library-sector campaigns such #ebookSOS and #GreenLibraries.

This rebrand marks another top-down decision in a series of events that have impacted people’s perceptions of the platform. Musk has already had to roll back a series of counter-intuitive changes to the brand that have alienated users and advertisers.

A possible solution to the searchability issue would be to incorporate the .com in the ‘X’ brand, at the cost of losing some of the aesthetic charm of the single letter name.

Apparently, tweets will now become ‘Xs’. But will they really?

Those of us who are still struggling with the rebranding of Opal Fruits to Starburst will know how difficult it is to force a change in an iconic brand.

Dr Beth Montague-Hellen can be found on X as @Phdgeek, on Mastodon as @DrBeth@ glammr.us and on Bluesky as @drbeth.bsky.social