You’re the founder or a C-Suite executive for a cleantech company with a Twitter account (I refuse to call it X, for the record). You and your team are either uncomfortable or outraged by the direction of the social media platform and the antics of its owner, Elon Musk, in support of now President-Elect Donald Trump, who claims climate change is a hoax and who wants to cut many of the public sector grants, loans, and incentives that have been the lifeblood of the climate tech industry. Yet your company has spent considerable time on Twitter and has amassed an audience of hundreds if not thousands, of interested followers who might one day invest in your company or who are inspired by your mission and want to work for you.</p>
Do you deactivate your account and cut ties with a social media platform that doesn’t align with your company’s values? Do you continue to pump out content for a shrinking audience on the platform? Or do you put energy and resources into building a social media channel on a new network like Threads or Bluesky?
Why Should Cleantech Companies Even Bother With Social Media?
We live in an age of information saturation, and the news release your team put out about your quarterly earnings, new hire, or government grant has a shelf life shorter than the average sitcom. Our attention spans are so attenuated that the phrase “15 minutes of fame” today is about 14 minutes longer than you can retain an audience’s focus.
The upshot is that your cleantech company needs a brand channel of content.Top 5 Reasons Your Climate Tech Startup Must Create Content That’s where platforms like Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn come in. You produce video, audio, or written content for an eager audience. Think Netflix or Amazon without paid subscribers.
Social media allows you to attract an audience that is as niche as your company and keep them in the loop on their terms.
Of course, social media’s downside is the ever-changing algorithms that can highlight or throttle your content without your consent. This is why social media is a complement rather than a replacement for the email list your company controls.
Regardless, those who choose to follow you on Twitter have taken a real interest in your company, and you should treat them as a digital ambassador for your company because those advocates can spread your news to more like-minded individuals more efficiently than at any other time in human history.
Climate Tech Meets Cognitive Dissonance
We all have contradictory thoughts without them splitting the corpus callosum. Case in point: no one under 60 will admit to liking (or even knowing) Neil Diamond, but everyone, regardless of age, will sing along to the bridge of Sweet Caroline in a crowd.
You don’t have to like Elon or the creative destruction he’s unleashed on Twitter’s platform. Still, there are 500 million subscribers to his social media network (200 million daily users), and those who choose to subscribe are much more interested in news and politics (and climate) than any other social platform.
Meta’s competitor, Threads, has 275 million subscribers, but it makes it abundantly clear that its algorithm de-emphasizes news and politics. Bluesky, where many Twitter defectors have emigrated for a more climate-friendly feed, only has 15 million subscribers globally.
To Tweet Or Not To Tweet
I advise my clients to invest time first on LinkedIn because you can hyper-target your audience with the same kind of content without the blowback of trolls or concern that you’ve made an enemy at Spaceship X’s command center. I also urge my clients to create their own YouTube channel because videos will always grab more eyeballs than online written content. Google owns YouTube, and you always want to stay on its good side, whether or not your company is producing ads.
Keeping your Twitter account comes down to two questions:
How many followers do you have on the platform? If you are concerned that your company has lost a significant share post-presidential election, there are inexpensive tools you can use, like Fedica, to get an accurate count. For about $15/month, they will comb through your follower list so you can scrub inactive and deactivated accounts and show you how many live accounts remain. Think twice before deactivating your account if it’s in the hundreds or thousands.
Do you intend to produce regular content? The 80/20 rule applies to social media content as it applies to life. About 20% of the accounts produce 80% of the content. Content is king on social media platforms, and the algorithms will reward you for filling up feeds with entertaining and informative videos, news, and observations. On the other hand, if your cleantech company posts sporadically or only when someone is attending a conference or winning an award, you can deactivate and make a performative statement. Before you do, let your followers know what other platforms they can find your content.
A final bit of advice, whether you stay or leave Twitter: We live in a disaggregated information world, and it’s been a long time since news was dominated by three major networks and the upstart CNN. Your content needs to be where your audience lives, so you should never be overly reliant on any platform. Owning the means of distribution, i.e., your email list is the most effective way to keep them in the loop.