Over the weekend I decided to conduct a little experiment.
I've been on Twitter for quite a while so I thought check out some of my oldest buddies, right at the very beginning of my list. I then un-followed Twitter buddies I no longer considered to be of relevance to me.
Un-clicking some of my list was easy. I knew immediately that the account I was following no longer held an appeal for me. It also became apparent that some of the people I was following had either never followed me back or had un-followed me long ago.
For some of the borderline accounts I decided to click through and have a read of various feeds, to further determine if any of the posts were worth reading and the respective account worth saving.
I wasn't at all shocked or surprised to find that many Twitter accounts had simply been abandoned.
The above screenshot is just one incident but so many accounts I clicked through to, were simply dormant. The last addition to the above feed was December 2012.
Perhaps what was a little more surprising was the amount of people - or businesses - behind these accounts that appeared to have stopped trading.
Clicking through to many of the the respective websites, linked to their Twitter accounts, returned as unobtainable. I followed up further on a random number of unobtainable websites by doing further searches on the net but I still drew a blank.
Two questions arise. Firstly, do people just fall out of love with Twitter (or social media in general)? Or do they just not get social media?
But what about the businesses behind them?
I found that most of the accounts that had been abandoned were small landscaping companies or accounts of garden designers. Out of the abandoned garden design Twitter accounts, the majority were female.
It's widely accepted that the landscape industry is highly transitional.
Many that start-up in business simply cannot make a go of it for one reason or another. Competition in the landscape industry is very tough with too many small businesses competing for too little work.
In the case of garden designers. For many there just isn't enough business coming through, or it's just not profitable enough, to sustain a business.
Have a go yourself and see what kind of results you get.
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