Users are finally remembering that it’s called X now, not Twitter
Almost two years later, the name might just be starting to stick.
Whether it’s a baby, a company, a pope, or a product, naming things is hard.
When Mark Zuckerberg wanted to change Facebook’s name to better reflect his aspirations in the metaverse, a marketing team was likely drafted in for mountains of moolah to come up with... Meta. Aberdeen Asset Management, a steward of more than $670 billion, disemvoweled itself in 2021, becoming “abrdn” for reasons best known to themselves, before adding the letters back this year. Netflix got screamed at for trying “Qwikster” as the name of its DVD business, Radio Shack hoped calling itself the Shack would revive its fortunes, and Pizza Hut has toyed with a few names — all of which the public hated.
Some companies just give up altogether and start using common first names for their brands and ideas. There’s Dave, the insurance company; Jasper, which can help you write marketing copy; Claude, the AI chatbot; and Alexa, Amazon’s robot assistant — a product that’s sent the name’s popularity plummeting after its release in 2015.
In 2019, I wanted to start a media company that made a lot of charts, and the best I could muster up was Chartr. It is hard.
X marks the spot
So, once you finally have a name that billions of people around the world recognize, changing it overnight would seem like a very high-risk experiment to run. Still, that’s exactly what Elon Musk did one Sunday in July 2023 when he announced that he’d be completely rebranding Twitter — which he dropped $44 billion on less than a year earlier — to X.
If data from Google is anything to go by, people are just now remembering its new name more often than not, with searches for “X login” finally outweighing those for “Twitter login” in recent weeks.
Based, then, on this very unscientific analysis, it seems like 18 to 24 months is a rough ballpark for how long it takes to reshape the name of a product in the wider public psyche. But of course, these are just the users looking to log in to the platform via Google; for many others, it’ll likely always be Twitter... or at least “X, formerly known as Twitter.”
