Apple is the world’s most valuable brand and company. And when it comes to marketing their products and services, Apple does something that no other company does, and if they can do it and still be worth $2.6 Trillion (yes trillion with a T), you can do it. Look at the screen shot up there… It’s their Twitter account. Notice anything? They follow nobody and they have never tweeted. Never.
So while you may not want to do everything Apples does, this is a good opportunity to reexamine your social strategy. While once social media – in particular Twitter – was fun and a new and cool way for companies to engage with their customers, and was a great way to have their employees be brand ambassadors, that time has long passed. It is now time to GET YOUR COMPANY OFF TWITTER.
Let me ask you a question – when you venture onto Twitter, and read threads, are you in a better mood or a worse mood than when you went on? If you’re like the overwhelming number of people, and the evidence is clear here, you are in a worse mood. And you’re probably angry. And that applies to your employees. Do you really want that in your employees? Apple is the ultimate B-C to company, and yet they don’t need Twitter to interact with their millions (billions?) of customers.
As I said, once upon a time, Twitter was awesome. A fun way to connect with people and join in national conversations. But then Twitter turned political, and has turned into a cesspool, designed to get you angry because, perversely, that is what drives traffic. But is that what you want for your brand and your employees? And what’s worse, many of the “accounts” (I won’t say people) with whom you are engaging are not legitimate accounts. They are either bots, or worse, faceless people working in Twitter Mills deep in China or North Korea.
You need only take a look at so many of the insane comments on a typical heated Twitter exchange on politics, or Covid or many other hot-button issues, and what you will see are arguments between accounts with only double-digit followers (often single digits).
Now, one’s value isn’t based on how many people follow you on Twitter, but at some point, this becomes glaring. It is well known that Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets cultivate anger to drive engagement, and those accounts are designed to do that.
Modern Twitter for many companies has turned into a help desk / complaint line. Why would you want ranting / angry people using your marketing cache and social media to blast you and blast that out to the general public? And why would you want your employees to engage in a platform designed to make them angry. You shouldn’t (and you shouldn’t reward the companies like Twitter’s questionable practices.) It may seem hard, but it isn’t. It’s time. Trust me, you’ll never miss it and you’ll be much better off for it! Be a quitter on Twitter.