Small Business Brief By Bacal: Customer Service is Up To You

Twitter by Numbers – Still “Little Commercial Value” For Small Business

I keep hoping I’ll find numbers that validate that spending time on Twitter actually delivers ANY reasonable return on investment. Periodically I look at numbers and surveys, and what I see is that companies BELIEVE it’s good to invest in Twitter and other social media platforms, but positive hard verifiable data is STILL lacking. I believe it’s lacking because it’s a bad investment. That’s not to say it won’t improve. As I’ve been saying for just about a year:

• Here’s just some numbers that are suggestive but support this position. My account, #smallbizIQ has about 2500 followers. We try to trim, unfollow people who are not active on Twitter (actually for no good reason except being a bit compulsive). Today, I looked at our followers: Of 2500 followers 2089 have not POSTED a single tweet for two weeks. That’s 83% not tweeting. Of 2500 followers 436 have not tweeted at all this year. That’s 17%. I’ll accept interpretations in the comment, but it looks to me that these numbers provide additional support for what we know from other more rigorous studies and data:
• The number of followers you think you have is way more than you really have, when you consider dead accounts, and people who have given up. Figuring in that not everyone will see your tweets anyway, what tiny fraction of followers will see it, be interested, and read it? We don’t know. We can guess it could be as small a fraction as 1 in 100. So, for every hundred “raw” followers, my guess is that ONE, on average will read (in any meaningful way) a tweet of yours.
• We know that many people join, try things out for a day or two, and abandon their accounts, although these accounts still exist in statistics. But it looks like something else is happening. When I look at the 17% of my followers who have not tweeted this year, do I find people who tweeted once or twice? Do I find people who followed one or two people? Or had no followers? In fact these abandoners range from those with a single tweet, which is no surprise up to people with over 18,000 tweets. Same with follower numbers in terms of pattern. This group contains the people, interested in small business, who TRIED it, for a fairly good trial, and gave up. Probably for good reason.
• Good reason? Yes. The cost of accumulating followers (people who will read you regularly PLUS have an interest in most of your tweets) is so high that combined with attrition/churn, it’s almost impossible for a small business to get this to work. Period.

Lest you wonder “Is it the same for other social media platforms?’ Yes, I believe so.