A few months back, I blogged about the conversations now taking place in comms team about leaving X, formerly Twitter.
As with anything with social media there were some strong opinions so I tried to keep it as dispassionate as possible. You can read the post here.
The Guardian has now re-fired the debate with their news they were stopping using the platform and in turn that has led to people to take a fresh look at how their organisation uses the platform.
So, I thought I’d take a look at an additional question. How many are actually SEEING what’s being posted onto X, formerly Twitter?
Using publicly available data I pulled together this list.
I worked out the total number of people who had seen the last 20 tweets the account had posted, worked out an average and then measured that as a percentage of their follower numbers.
Here’s a datamapper visualisation…
What’s clear is that journalists and politicians are still getting their content seen.
After all, social media loves the new, loves opinions and loves outrage. So, journos and political leaders perform well.
But what about the public sector? Well, that’s a different case.
I’ve tried to reflect at random elements of local government, fire & rescue, police and NHS. How do they perform? Not so great.
One council has 0.1 percent of their follower numbers seeing their tweets.
There’s no implied criticism of any of those account admins. Who knows, if there’s a busy week those figures may rise. During the awful murders in Southport and the following riots across towns in England its possible that those tweets travelled far further. Should X, formerly Twitter be reserved for just emergencies?
What’s clear, is that the audience for many accounts has moved on.
I carry out social media reviews for bright people looking to make sense of a changing landscape.
Interesting analysis. Another important point is that nine of the top 10 are people, not organisation accounts. Three are probably being run by a team they are still people accounts. Too often people forget that social media is two words. It’s not just media, but social. People are social. I still recall and even cite in training courses the title of Euan Semple’s book way back in 2012. ‘Organisations don’t tweet, people do’. They don’t need to read the book as the title makes the point.
Interesting Dan. I do think it’s easier to create an engaged community among smaller group, and it definitely helps if you have a two way conversation, not just talk at people. Orgs can end up doing this on their main accounts.