I keep monthly track of the stats on the various Blackstone Valley Art Association social networks. The BVAA is currently on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. We are setting up an account on Mastodon (Twitter alternative). This message is about Twitter. It was written on May 2, 2023.
I have been quite active on Twitter over the years. I maintain 40 accounts on Twitter for a variety of purposes. Our BVAA account had over 8000 followers. Generally I aim for a daily post rate. Our follower counts have always climbed – but recently they are dropping despite the regular posts. I’m seeing this same behavior on all my Twitter accounts. People are simply leaving Twitter and entirely deleting their accounts. Those who stay on Twitter are not interacting as regularly. The remaining followers are often dormant. Impression and activity levels are plummeting.
I will note even just now when I tried to go to Twitter to verify the numbers, Twitter kept crashing on me. Twitter has become wholly unreliable.
BVAA Twitter February 2023 – note specifically the ‘new followers’ value.
BVAA Twitter March 2023 – again ‘new followers’ is falling despite the regular posts.
BVAA Twitter April 2023 – current stats – more followers leaving, fewer views on what we post.
The last time I recorded statistics for ValleyCAST on Twitter was in June 2022. Note that we had to rebuild this account from scratch in December 2020 because we lost access to the previous one. So this new account had made 687 tweets in the year and a half of its new life and gained 302 followers.
ValleyCAST now, nearly a year later, only went from 302 followers to 312 followers which, given the previous rate of increase, sounds like it gained a bunch and then lost nearly all of them again once Musk took over. Over that entire year ValleyCAST only had a net gain of 10 new followers. It’s also worth noting the number of people ValleyCAST is *following*. That dropped from 1505 accounts to 1462 accounts. It’s not that ValleyCAST ‘unfollowed’ people. It’s that those people deleted their accounts so ValleyCAST therefore couldn’t follow them any more.
For the BVAA, I will keep posting on Twitter. There are still people who get information about the BVAA from Twitter. But I would not rely on Twitter as being a key long term way of reaching people. I will make sure the BVAA’s other social networks are strong and stable. I will work on building the BVAA up on Mastodon (a Twitter alternative) to get visibility with people who are active there.
I have a how-to book for Twitter, which I updated probably a month ago. Meaning it’s already out of date in a number of areas, but it’s mostly helpful 😉. 
Ask with any questions!
