Twitter Re-brands to X or 𝕏! Is it time to remove social bounce points from your website?

I would always advise you not link out to social media profiles. One of the recent trends is them changing names/brands and logos. Twitter is now X, facebook is now Meta and both have quite poor logo redesigns. If the Facebook rebrand is taken as a case study, I cant imagine any real adoption to the brand Meta, the new logo is bland and forgettable. The new X rebrand is bizarre to say the least, I personally wont be adding an X logo/icon to my site at any point. But I left that platform years back as it has zero SEO value, it now is all behind a login and none of the free feed APIs work anymore. Twitter becoming X is in ways its way of asking users to leave or eXit, pardon the terrible pun

If you want to keep using twitter branding/icons

At present you have no materials: https://about.twitter.com/en/who-we-are/brand-toolkit has not updated, and was blocked around the 29th behind a login wall, then removed all up. In August a new version started to be created, but the brand has 3 different version live as of the time of writing, you could not make this stuff up if you tried. You can see the old copy of the original twitter page here: https://web.archive.org/web/20230727125627/https://about.twitter.com/en/who-we-are/brand-toolkit again this is a bizarre rebrand without any real plan/logic. Twitter has been a mess recently, this seems to be the crescendo of it all.

Update as of August, you can with the most up to date version of FontAwesome (you most likely dont have this) get a version: https://fontawesome.com/icons/x-twitter The icon/brand has changed again since this post was first authored too. Again I would see this as a call to action to remove this failing platform from your site as a link.

If you have the most up to date version, its a lot trickier to get working than it was, with accounts etc the following code will do the trick:

<i class="fa-brands fa-x-twitter"></i>

Ironically the new logo is a Unicode character

𝕏 which means he took a letter of sorts and used as his brand. So for now you can do this too. It’s unclear when setups like FontAwesome https://fontawesome.com/icons/twitter will update to the new logo, but they are very unlikely to backwards engineer the older versions.You can see a quite confused debate here: https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/issues/19827 which you can track. Option one updated fa-twitter, option 2 is unclear as fa-x wont work. I think its very likely to change again too, this was not a professional rebrand after all.

You can see the new meta logo here https://fontawesome.com/icons/meta but adoption is poor as the logo has no impact as an icon. I do not (yet) see Meta logos all over folks websites, I see Facebook icons still. Equally Using X as a brand will mean searches will 100% contain NSFW and adult content, the X word is for profanity, no amount of branding will change this.

The message here is take this as a time to remove all social bounce points, see if you can find the one I have on this site out to LinkedIn.

If you have Social media links all over the footers/headers of your site, just stop and think, why send users back to social media, they convert on your website, social media cannot sell you or your service. Don’t get the idea inverted, keep sharing links on social back to your website, not the other way around.