Hidden Failures - Abandoned Twitter Business Accounts

Written by Robert Bacal |

Learning From The Winners & Losers of Social Media - Learning From Social Media Stars and Winners

Several times I've noted that the few business successes that occur involving social media are repeated over and over, even when they aren't real successes, while the failures are silent and unnoticed. The social media pundits and evangelists don't seem to want to deal with that. So, here are a few specifics, garnered from the list of people I follow and am followed by via my @socialmediabust Twitter account.

Thes are accounts (along with particulars - followers, # of tweets, and last post) that have "gone dark" recently.

Carbon Advice Group:25k+ Followers, 341 tweets, dead for 6+months

Attention Age Media: 115 followers, 304 tweets, dead for 5 months

Influence Engine: 1214 followers, 85 tweets, dead for 5 months

Small Biz Loans: 715 followers, 475 tweets, dead for 5 months

Social Media SEO: 1515 followers, 64 tweets, dead for ~5 months

The Korr Group: 9 followers, 36 tweets, dead for 3 months (well, that was quick)

HugePLRprofits: 6033 followers, 7 tweets, dead for 10 months

Jooclub: 10854 followers, 98 tweets, dead for 7 months

New Biz Hosting: 762 followers, 71 tweets, dead for 5 months

and on and on.

Before you comment be aware that we purge our Twitter lists regularly to remove inactive accounts, so we don't have older accounts that have given up, but trust me, we've seen hundreds and hundreds of businesses who have given up on Twitter, many of them with large followings where they have clearly made major commitments to Twitter, and failed.

I'm just presenting these to help people understand the idea of invisible social media failures and to drive home the point that successes, the few and far between are talked about so much that it seems everyone is succeeding, and that the failures that clearly outnumber successes simply "go dark" silently and invisibly.

Stuff that's good to know if you want to make decisions about business and social media.

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Social Media Frauds

You know someone isn't worth following if they retweet compliments given to them by others. They are either frauds who are better at self-promotion than they are in their alleged area of expertise, or they are so insecure that they have to -- just have to, make sure that everyone knows how wonderful other people think they are. Hint: Run away. These folks are like empty drums. Bang on the outside and you get a cool sound. Empty inside -- nothing to offer.

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Technology legitimizes behavior, good or bad, through a process of making some behaviors easier than other behaviors. People then use easy routes because they are simply easier, even if the use of those methods are unethical, dishonest, or otherwise nasty. For example, technology legitimizes spam email because it has made it easier to contact thousands of people via spam email than any other email method. When in doubt about what something is doing, look at the behavior (spamming) and not the expressed prohibitions. How does this apply to social media?

Best Practices In Social Media? Fergetabatit

Most regular people don't have the time or inclination to read post after post, article after article telling us how to use social media to accomplish business goals. As a result most don't realize how poor and conflicting the advice is. For example, did you know that the key top business success in social media is content (how old fashioned)? No, wait. The next post on the same site says the key is relationship building one by one, while old Guy whatshisname says "No, no, it's all about the follower numbers, forget quality or relationships -- automate."

Is this significant? All the contradictions? You tell us. Who do you listen to? Is there any point to talking about best practices? Worse, could it be that they're all making things up?

SocialMediaBust