Should you still be using your corporate X, formerly Twitter? It’s a question I’m often asked so I thought I’d write an analysis.
There are a great many reasons to not use the organisation’s channel. Since the takeoever of Twitter by Elon Musk it has opened back up to some unsavoury characters. A BBC investigation reported that it was now unsafe.
Then there’s the limit on the number of tweets than can be seen which diminishes its role as an emergency comms channel at the same time as verified accounts being stopped and blue ticks sold off to all comers.
Then there’s been Elon Musk’s attack on British politics warning of Civil War in the wake of far right riots and retweeting false claims rioters will be sent to the Falkland Islands.
Enough. Surely?
I loved early Twitter but I’ve not used the platform in earnest for 12-months. I grew sick of the algorithm pushing me extremist politics and anyway, the people who had made it a great place had moved on.
As this tweet says, it’s pretty unusable.
So, would my recommendation be to close your corporate account and go full Stephen Fry to quit the platform as an organisation?
Actually, no. But do please be mindful of the abuse. This tweet from Northamptonshire Local Recovery Forum is eye-opening. If you click through and check out the comments do so knowing that they are deeply offensive. You need a set of social media house rules to show you how to handle this.
But should you still use it? It depends on your audience.
Your own personal account
There’s two questions to answer with this. Your own account and the corporate account. For your own account, hey, that’s down to you. If you find it a deserted hellscape then don’t use it.
It’s true that for comms people, the discuission has moved more to LinkedIn and Facebook groups.
This is more about the corporate account.
What X is good for
It’s very clear that journalists remain all over the platform. National reporters as well as local ones are still finding stories there and organisations are still connecting with them there.
Indeed, the UK Home Office in the days after the summer 2024 riots have been using their account as a ticker for prosections.
Like this one.
Indeed, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s video to lay down the law to those found breaking the law has been seen 3.5 million times in three days on the platform. The video went to other channels too.
I blogged recently on the impact of WhatsApp and Facebook groups on local news.
Both of these channels were responsible for the flow of information from the street and neighbourhood before the events in Southport reached a wider regional and national audience.
But how about the health of the platform as a whole outside an emergency?
One thing I do when I’m conducting a social media review is to calculate the number of dormant accounts on what used to be Twitter. I use a subscriber tool called Fedica. Helpfully, it can give you a breakdown of followers on any account and analyse if their account is active. What is dormant? It means no posts in the past six months.
As a real world experiment, I decided to run the rule over the public sector in the Black Country where I live. Where’s the Black Country? It’s that bit of the West Midlands west of the M5. Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton self-identify as Black Country.
If you’ve not been to the Black Country Living Musuem in Tipton you really should.
So firstly, I thought I’d run the council accounts through Fedica to analyse them.
Here’s what I found.
Black Country council X, formerly Twitter, accounts active followers v dormant followers
Source: Fedica.
First reaction? That’s a lot of dormant accounts.
Around 75 per cent of all four council’s X, formerly Twitter followers haven’t been active.
So, for @walsallcouncil, of the 35,000 followers this means just over 5,500 have been active in the last six months.
This makes me reflective as I set-up this account in 2009 when I was working for Walsall Council. I sent the first tweet and battled to convince people to take it seriously.
Scrolling through their timeline I can also see the number of people who have seen the tweet. Around 300 is common rising to around 750 for the more popular content.
But Walsall is not an outlier. The other Black Country councils in the region have a similar number.
But, is this just councils? How about the NHS?
Black Country NHS X, formerly Twitter, accounts active followers v dormant followers
Source: Fedica.
NHS accounts show around two thirds of accounts are dormant and are all showing similar numbers. That’s fewer than compared to local government.
Perhaps the recent pandemic is the reason for this as health news then came at a premium.
But how about blue light services such as police, ambulance and fire and rescue?
West Midland blue light services X, formerly Twitter, accounts active followers v dormant followers
West Midlands Ambulance Service @OfficialWMAS 25.3 per cent active 74.7 per cent dormant. West Midlands Police @WMPolice 22 per cent active 88 per cent dormant.
Source: Fedica.
The police take the prize. West Midlands Police had the highest dormant numbers with 88 per cent followed by West Midlands Fire and Rescue on 77.8 per cent and West Midlands Ambulance at 74.7 per cent.
Yet while the region’s police have the highest number of dormant accounts a recent tweet about the arrest of a man with what looked like a gun at a riot in Birmingham was seen more than 77,000 times.
So, in an emergency it all starts to make sense.
Conclusion
The first thing to say is that there are some hugely talented people who work in the public sector in the Black Country. I’ve worked with several.
Indeed, I’m sure those comms people are not relying on X, formerly Twitter, to get their message out and I’m pretty sure they’re alive to the issue of falling users on Musk’s platform.
The recent riots sheds light on what to use in an emergency. Big numbers can still be reached when information is at a premium.
There’s talk about Twitter alternatives such as Blue Sky, Mastodon and Threads. None of them have the reach of Twitter at its peak. Of those, Threads Meta’s Twitter alternative is the strongest horse to back but some distance away from being a full Twitter equivalent in the UK.
Users on Threads are moving upwards but UK users can still be measured in hundreds of thousands.
But for Elon Musk’s platform, it’s striking that the Labour Party’s successful General Election social media constituency strategy was Facebook groups, WhatsApp and Nextdoor. Why? They correctly identified that’s not where the constituents were. Journalists and other MPs, yes. Voters in that constituency? Not really.
People have moved away from what used to be Twitter but haven’t entirely abandoned it. LinkedIn and Facebook groups are there for discussion.
So what to do with it?
If you want to reach journalists and people in an emergency then X is still relevant.
On a routine day-to-day the numbers in these examples don’t support frequent use. To reach residents its WhatsApp, Facebook groups and Nextdoor. To reach journalists its maybe a mix of WhatsApp and X.
Right now in 2024, public sector X, formerly Twitter makes sense as a prime emergency channel rather than a prime daily platform.
This may mean a recalibration of how you use the account rather than abandoning it altogether.
For more about the social media reviews I run for organisations head here.
Dan,
Thank you for this excellent and insightful piece of research. I’m especially interesting in the police main channel Twitter/X accounts and seeing if the trend for dormant vs. active followers has the same pattern as West Midlands Police account. My personal interest is the @EssexPoliceUK account. How feasible would it be to generate some extended metrics for the other police main X accounts to illustrate active vs. dormant followers?
Another aspect of this research is the proportion of followers which could be perceived to be ‘fake’, ‘auto-generated’ or ‘bot’ accounts. I’ve often wondered if there are similar analytics software available that can attempt to answer this one. My one manual method is to look at the last 100 followers of any account and make a reasonable visual judgement. There are various tell-tale signs of an automated bot account which, in combination build a fairly strong case. My method is only any use for dip-sample checks but the last one I did was overwhelmingly biased to ‘bots’. 71% were fake accounts, 27 were real people (of which only 7 were likely to be from he relevant area) and 2 represented organisations. I wonder if this could account for many of the dormant accounts?
Hi David. That’s a great point about bots. I’m not aware of any software that can map bot accounts for X/Twitter but I do like your manual method.I suspect that’s probably more reliable than any. As far as producing something for a range of police forces that shouldn’t be too hard. It’s probably half a day’s work although one issue may be the limit of accounts that can be checked. Using Fedica at the research level (about £70 a month) allows you to make an analysis of accounts with a combined two million of followers. Often police corporate accounts have quite big follower numbers so you may find yourself quickly hitting the ceiling. Drop me a note at dan at danslee dot co dot uk if you need more.
Hi, you suggest hanging into Twitter for emergencies/crisis communication. I can’t find a dare for this fascinating article, but wonder if that position has changed? My concerns are a) the private owner of any platform could restrict the reach of those comms, whilst doing nothing to curb disinformation. This seems to me to create a critical risk when an organisation has potentially life saving advice to disseminate.
And b) continued use of the platform is in effect an endorsement and obliges constituents/residents to open an account just to receive critical public information: school closures, highways, police will all day in news reports ‘follow our twitter’. Should they not consider the reputational damage of being so closely associated with a channel where hate speech, discrimination and sexual content are proliferated unchecked?
When I worked in local government I re-wrote our emergency planning plan. This covered how we would use different channels in an emergency. Before this point we had been using social media but nmone of it had been written down. “Now remember Dan,” the emergency planner said when I sat down with him to go through it, “We may have to take the stand in a public enquiry and talk through everything that we are doing.” That was quite sobering and I realised that we had to set out our workings out in public. I’m struck that for recent emergencies such as the Manchester Arena attack how organisations communicated were closely scrutinised. At that point Twitter was funfdamental to how the public sector communicated. I don’t think we’ve definitively moved away from it just yet hence I think it should be retained for an emergency brief. However, if orgs through their Local Resilience Forum were of the opinion other channels were better and wrote that in their new plan, I’m fine with that. The learning from Southport is that WhatsApp and Facebook were how those communities first communicated.