What Twitter is really for

Vulture’s Wolfgang Ruth corrects a common misconception.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

If you want to know what brand I don’t like on social media, then become a paid subscriber to read last week’s Sunday Scroll. —Kate

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Twitter has always been my least favorite platform, and there are plenty of times—especially during 2020—that I would have been happy to try and log on one morning and find that it had disappeared. But now that the death of Twitter seems like a real possibility, whether thanks to its incompetent owner or users losing interest because of said incompetent owner, the downsides of its potential end are coming into sharper focus. Perhaps most overlooked in the conversations about the platform are the people who have made their living using it: the social media managers behind brand accounts. 

Read: What happens to journalists after Twitter?

In a Twitter thread last week, Vulture senior social media manager Wolfgang Ruth pushed back against a popular narrative that Twitter does nothing for publications. Sure, it’s rarely the main source of traffic, but there are other, less quantifiable ways a Twitter presence can serve a brand account, especially one in the pop culture space.

“Like yes, twitter doesnt drive a *TON* of traffic!” the thread continues. “But having that as the main mindset for publications + orgs is a reason why social editors, managers, AND teams have always been so understaffed, overworked, and under-appreciated.”

Vulture is one of the few brand presences on Twitter that actually adds something to my feed, and hasn’t become cloying or too wrapped up in its own schtick. (Full disclosure: I write sometimes for Vulture. Read my column :).) Ruth and I hopped on a Zoom call shortly after his tweets to talk more in-depth about the state of brand social media in 2023. 

In this interview for paid subscribers, Ruth shares his ethos behind Vulture’s irreverent and witty Twitter presence, how it works in tandem with his own social media, and where he’d recommend brands move next if Twitter ever does shut down.