If you have 1000 followers on Twitter, about how many are really there? 80% of twitter accounts are abandoned. Still think it’s a great way to offer customer service?
‘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
