Social Media Accounts Abandoned - Twitter
Written by Robert Bacal | 
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| Social Media Platforms - Twitter |
I've talked a number of times about the rate of abandonment of Twtiter accounts being exceedingly high, particularly when it comes to businesses. Some people have suggested that the "giving up" phenomenon is a result of people testing the waters, and realizing it takes a lot of work, or otherwise not putting the effort into it, and as a result not getting a return.
That's an interesting take, but the reality is that it's not true, at least generally. Many of the abandoned accounts are characterized by sufficient tweets and followers to suggest that the businesses and individuals tried, some very very hard, to make things work, and finally realized it was a dry hole. Which it is and will be for most.
One could still argue that they failed because they didn't know how to do it right. That's something we really don't know. So what does the data look like? Compiling generalizable numbers is difficult without funding and resources, since there is data, but from eyeballing, I can present some rather startling examples of business attrition on Twitter. I'd conjecture that there is considerable and similar attrition on other social media platforms such as Facebook.
Our criteria is that an account is abandoned if there have been no tweets from it in a month. Here are some illustrations.
GeorgeKao - Social media marketer - 3253 followers - 730 tweets - gone one month
IMcashsaver - serving online business - 12995 followers - 15763 followers - gone one month
CoursePark - corporate learning - 461 followers - 549 tweets - gone one month
TracyRepchuk - Internet Marketer - 14954 followers - 6717 tweets - gone one month
StephenLibman - Performance Strategist - 2533 followers - 277 tweets - gone one month
BobPike - Trainer - 231 Followers - 163 tweets - gone one month
reith - Leadership Evangelist - 4135 followers - 4591 tweets - gone one month
maynaseric - Change agent - 35488 followers - 13024 tweets - gone for six weeks
This isn't meant to be a representative sample of those who have abandoned their accounts, but you can see that there is a lot of variety even from the ones I've selected. Are there instances of people who didn't end up with followers and only tweeted a few times?
Yes, but they are the minority. It's clear that the people who are abandoning have tried, some very hard, to make this work.
Sadly, for most, it doesn't, and they quietly exit, the invisible social media stories that we need to have to make proper business decisions.
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MicroThoughts
As a business you have to choose where to put your efforts on social media so there is a fit between the needs and mindset of your potential customers, and what you have to offer how you offer it and when yo offer it. If you don't you become an annoyance — social media spam.Mashable no-no
In response to a Mashable article about how Starbucks supposedly used social media to bring one million people into their stores in a day:
This is just terrible "journalism". First, the giveaways brought the people in. Second, we have no idea how many people came for the freebies hearing on it from Twitter or not. Third, They could have pulled people into their stores with this promotion in any of a number of ways. This is not a social media success, anymore than having sandwich board guys outside of each store would constitute a success for loitering.
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If you get the bulk of your information ABOUT social media THROUGH social media, your conclusions and understanding of it are going to be biased and quite out of whack.
Myth of Consumer Empowerment
Being Heard
The psychological need or desire to be heard is so powerful that we are willing to pretend that our tweets and status updates are being attended to, read, and thought about, even when it's clear that almost nobody is paying much attention. That's why people actually continue to talk about the trivialities in their lives even if nobody ever responds. That's one strong need!!
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