Cloud storage is invisible by design. Until something goes wrong.
Most people never think about where their files live or who can see them. In 2025, Proton Drive set out to change that on X by proving that a privacy-first storage brand can earn mainstream cultural attention.
Our four objectives for @ProtonDrive on X were:
The benchmark: our 2024 baseline of 1.6M impressions, 85K engagements, and 35.9K followers. Our growth targets were at least +10M impressions, double-digit follower growth, and higher engagement YoY.
Context that matters: we’re a five-person in-house social team managing over a dozen accounts across six platforms for Proton’s main company account plus six product accounts (Proton Mail, Proton VPN, Proton Pass, Proton Drive, Proton Wallet, and Lumo). Every result below was achieved without a single dollar of paid promotion.
We began by rewriting Proton Drive’s playbook from “product channel” to “main-character energy.” The team defined three non-negotiables for the new voice: never talk down to people, never hide the stakes of privacy, and never miss an opportunity to be a little unhinged when Big Tech deserved it.
Underpinning all of this was a simple creative idea: if every other cloud account talks like a press release, Proton Drive would be the cloud that talks back. Sharp, funny, and unafraid to sound nothing like a corporation.
Proton Drive’s X voice was built on a deliberate tension: serious mission, entertaining delivery. We talk about surveillance, AI data harvesting, and dark patterns in cloud storage, but we package it in culture-native formats (sharp dunks, brand-to-brand banter, memes with a point) so the message travels beyond the privacy niche.
Real-Time Response Engine
Speed is everything on X. We built a lightweight workflow to monitor privacy news, tech product launches, and viral cultural moments daily. Pre-agreed “safe zones” (anti-surveillance, pro-user rights, anti-dark patterns) let us react within hours without sacrificing accuracy or brand integrity. This engine powered our biggest moments of 2025:
Overcoming Challenges
The core creative challenge: balancing “funny” with “trusted.” Privacy content risks being either too technical (people scroll past) or too flippant (undermines credibility).
Our solution was a “humor → clarity” ladder: lead with a culturally fluent hook, then provide context in replies or threads so users could laugh, learn, and share. Critically, replies and conversations were treated as first-class content, with the same tone, values, and restraint as planned posts. Interestingly, several of our biggest moments of the year were replies, not planned content.
From January 1 to December 31, 2025, @ProtonDrive on X:
Objective 1 | Distinct human voice: The community didn't just consume our content—they adopted it. The "otherwise" format was copied by other accounts, and users began screenshotting and praising our posts as the standard for how brands should talk about privacy. The account stopped feeling like a brand and started feeling like a person.
Objective 2 | Hijack attention at peak moments: 16.9M impressions (+978% YoY from 1.6M). Dunks and newsjacking represented ~62% of total impressions and ~70% of engagements from fewer than 1 in 5 posts. A newsjacking post about Microsoft's AI photo scanning rollout in OneDrive was one of our top performers of the year.
Objective 3 | Make cloud privacy mainstream: 1.2M engagements (+1,356% YoY from 85K), 433K video views (+763% YoY). Content spread organically to Reddit and beyond. A Google AI meme hit 24.4% engagement rate, triple our annual average.
Objective 4 | Spark community conversation: Engagement rate climbed to 7.3% (+35% YoY) as the audience grew +55% from 36K to 55K. Replies often were the strategy: thanking Naomi Brockwell (166K impressions), acknowledging an "otherwise" participant (142K), replying "on our roadmap" to a feature request (78K), and "@app_settings bro" (58K). They overperformed because they felt human.
Versus the competition: Proton Drive ranked #1 for engagements per post (615) across 20 tracked competitors (20× the average of 30) while posting half as often. #2 for net audience growth (+19.9K), just behind Notion (9× our follower base). Competitors averaged a net loss of 54K followers.
