Since Elon Musk became X’s owner, he wanted to transform the social network into an all-in-one platform. The former CEO started prioritizing Twitter payments as part of a strategy to move X toward his vision.
Given the pace of its development, it’s challenging to keep up with and understand the various financial changes on the platform.
Let’s look at these reforms to understand the future of X.
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Twitter Payment Service: The Road To Becoming an All-In-One Platform
Elon Musk is quite open about his desire to make X, formerly Twitter, an all-in-one platform like WeChat. In other words, he wants X to be more than a micro-blogging social network. The billionaire owner’s dream is to provide various fintech services to its users.
In August 2022, he set up Twitter Payments LLC, now X Payments LLC, to bring his vision to life. He wants X to be a payment processor where people can connect their bank accounts and make financial transactions.
The social media giant informed readers through its latest blog about its goal to make peer-to-peer transactions possible in 2024.
This is no easy task, as moving in this direction means X must comply with various strict regulations. Generally, social media platforms don’t take this route, as authorities will hold them accountable if anything goes wrong.
Although several hurdles come with this move, X continues to walk this path.
According to the Nationwide Multistate Licensing System (NMLS), X has licenses with 16 states. As of January 2024, 14 states provided a money transmitter license to Twitter.
X also made it easier to monitor the financial market, thanks to its partnership with eToro. eToro is a trading company where you can access financial assets like stocks and cryptocurrencies.
The platform now has cashtags, where you can track trading data in real-time. It resembles a hashtag, where you must use “$” before the stock or sticker symbol. For example, if you enter $BTC in the platform’s search bar, it displays the price of the popular cryptocurrency. In addition, you’ll also see all posts using cashtag in their tweets.
The platform draws the stock information from TradingView, the market data partner for eToro.
Understanding Twitter Interest Payments and Their Importance
As you may already know, Elon Musk bought the social media giant for $44 billion. To make this purchase, he took $13 billion. He approached several banks such as Societe Generale, Bank of America, BNP Paribas, Morgan Stanley, and Mizuho for these funds.
These financial institutions provided $6.5 billion as term loans. When you take this line of credit, banks will set a repayment timetable with a floating or fixed interest rate.
Furthermore, $6 billion of the debt was in the form of junior and senior bonds. Also, X has $500 million as revolving credit as part of the deal with the banks.
As a result, the social network has to pay $300 million as Twitter interest payments every quarter. This means the annual interest of the loans is $1.2 billion.
X makes a significant portion of its revenue from advertising. As several large advertisers no longer use the platform, there was considerable doubt about Twitter’s ability to make these payments.
Fortunately, there were no problems, as X successfully made two quarterly interest payments.
How did the social network do this despite going through a challenging time? First, the platform cut costs significantly by laying off most of its workforce.
It switched from focusing on large companies for advertising to small and medium-sized businesses. Also, it introduced X Premium, a subscription service to offer exclusive features to subscribers.
How Do Twitter Payments Work?: Making Life Easier for Creators
X had to come up with an innovative solution to attract more creators. In July 2023, the platform launched its Ads Revenue Sharing program. You might be curious about how Twitter payments work if you’re a creator.
First, you need to meet the following requirements to be eligible for this program:
- You have over 500 followers on X.
- When X displayed ads in your posts reply section, it received 5 million organic impressions over three months. This is for all your posts combined.
- You have an X Premium or X Premium+ subscription.
After you join this program for creators, you need to create an account with Stripe. This payment processor handles all payments related to X.
Twitter will only release the payment if you meet the minimum threshold of $50. If you don’t hit this target, it rolls the amount to the next month.
After you cross this threshold, the platform won’t take more than 90 days to send this amount. Once it processes the funds, you can expect to receive it within 3 – 5 business days.
If someone disputes the transaction and requests a chargeback, you, as the creator, will have to bear the loss. X deducts this amount from the total payout. You may also have to pay for any additional charges incurred by X for the chargeback.
For the first $50,000, you’ll receive 97% of your revenue from the platform’s creator program. The share reduces to 90% after you cross this bar.
Twitter Ads Payment: How X Charges You for Your Marketing Campaign
The best part about marketing on X is how the platform charges you for running your campaign. You never have to worry about exceeding your budget to keep up with your competitors.
The final Twitter ads payment depends on the billable actions. The platform uses this metric to determine how much to charge you for your campaign.
When you create a campaign, you need to choose your goal. This influences how X will calculate the cost of your marketing efforts.
For example, if you run an awareness campaign to increase your reach, the billable action is impressions. For every 1,000 impressions the ad receives, you pay an equivalent amount.
What if your goal is to get more people to visit your e-commerce platform? You need to run a website traffic campaign. X will look at the number of clicks the link to your website gets in the ad.
For a followers campaign, the platform charges you every time a user follows you after seeing the ad.
This means you won’t have to pay if the user’s engagement activity doesn’t meet the billable actions requirement. For instance, you use a website traffic campaign to increase visitors. Furthermore, X won’t charge you if users follow you or view the ad.
After you set a cap on how much the platform can spend, X will never exceed your budget.
X also changed its automatic billing guidelines in June 2023. As per the new rules, your credit or debit card will receive a charge if:
- You spent at least $500 or 25% of the credit limit
- You started the campaign seven days ago, or it is the last calendar day of the month
How To Add Payment Method on Twitter
You need to know how to add a payment method on Twitter to run ads on this social media platform. If you’re a first-time user of X Ads, here’s what you must do:
Method 1:
- Open ads.x.com or ads.twitter.com on your desktop browser.
- You’ll see your name with a downward-facing arrow in the top navigation bar. Left-click it to view the dropdown menu.
- Select the first option, Add New Payment Method, and enter your credit card details.
Method 2:
- Visit X Ads on a desktop browser.
- You need to create a new campaign to add a payment method. X will ask you to select the objective of your marketing campaign. Choose from the following goals:
- Create the copy for your ad, i.e., the text and media files. A preview section on the right shows how your campaign will look on X.
- On the next page, X will ask you to customize your ad. Choose your demographics, budget, schedule, and targeting features. At the bottom of the page, you’ll see the + Add Credit Card button. Left-click it and add your payment details. X will process payments on this card for all your future marketing campaigns.
The social media giant offers its ads products to over 200 regions worldwide and accepts the following payment methods:
- American Express
- China Union Pay
- Mastercard
- Diners Club, but only if you’re in the U.S.
- Japan Credit Bureau (JCB), but only in Japanese Yen and U.S. Dollars
- Visa
Make sure you check the payment information before sharing it with X. If X finds suspicious activity or there are multiple payment processing failures, it will halt your campaign.
You can ask X to remove its credit limit with an insertion order if your minimum monthly budget is $5,000.
Ensure You’re Eligible for Any X Payments Service for Creators With TweetDelete
After joining X’s Ads Revenue sharing program, you must follow the platform’s rules. Never engage in activities that go against its policies, as doing so will make you ineligible for this service.
Sometimes, you may break X’s rules because you weren’t aware of all its terms and conditions. The best way to ensure you’re always eligible is to review and delete your older posts. However, this is no easy task on Twitter, as the platform doesn’t provide the necessary features.
With TweetDelete, there is an auto-delete function to remove specific posts from your profile. You set the date range and parameters like tweets with certain Twitter keywords and hashtags. TweetDelete removes any post that matches these requirements regularly.
You can also go the manual route and use its custom filter to find specific posts. With the bulk-delete tweets feature, you can remove hundreds of posts within minutes.
Lastly, TweetDelete has a like-removal feature to delete your likes from posts. As you may already know, this activity is visible in the Likes tab on your profile. This section attracts unnecessary attention. TweetDelete can remove your likes from various tweets, so you don’t have to deal with controversies.
Use TweetDelete today to ensure you’re always eligible for any future Twitter payments service X introduces!
