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- Mark Cuban asked Elon Musk for help because he's losing followers on Twitter.
- The "Shark Tank" star said he starting paying for Twitter Blue after losing up to 1,000 followers a day.
- Twitter Blue subscribers are meant to get more visibility and promotion on their tweets.
Billionaire investor Mark Cuban told Elon Musk he's losing hundreds of Twitter followers a day despite paying for a Twitter Blue subscription.
In a tweet directed at the Twitter CEO, the "Shark Tank" star said he had losing between as many as 1,000 followers every day.
"To counter this I went Blue² thinking it gave me some preference and would help retain or grow users. Any suggestions?" he wrote in a tweet on Friday that's had 8.5 million views.
—Mark Cuban (@mcuban) March 31, 2023
Cuban, who joined Twiter in September 2008, still has a healthy 8.8 million followers on the platform.
Twitter Blue was launched in December following Musk's $44 billion takeover a few weeks earlier. It costs $8 a month, and allows users to edit tweets, write longer posts, and use two-factor authentication, among other features.
The official Twitter Blue profile tweeted in December that subscribers' posts would soon get priority ranking in search, mentions, and replies, in theory boosting their opportunity to win followers.
Musk is slowly offering more privileges for Blue subscribers.
In a tweet last week, he initially said users would only see verified accounts in the "For You" feed, which shows users tweets from accounts they don't follow. Musk backtracked to clarify that accounts users followed would also appear in those feeds.
"Legacy verified accounts," or those verified by Twitter prior to Musk's takeover and largely awarded to public figures and official news accounts, will start to lose their blue ticks this weekend, the company said.
According to a study by researcher Travis Brown, uptake of Twitter Blue has underwhelmed in both the quantity and quality of paid-up accounts. His research indicated that about half of Twitter Blue subscribers had less than 1,000 followers, while about 17% of subscribed accounts had less than 100 followers.
The average account subscribed to Twitter Blue had about 19,000 followers, Brown said.
Twitter didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider, but emails now routinely generate an automated response that fails to address the query.