A select group of 100 retail brands with a combined total of over 130 million followers on the X platform posted less than 850 times in the first three weeks of July 2024, possibly confirming retail’s retreat from the social network.
Elon Musk acquired Twitter in April 2022. Transform it X, loosening restrictions on tweets (now called posts).
Not everyone was happy with Musk’s changes, and many companies abandoned Twitter by the end of 2022. For example, clothing brand H&M stopped using Twitter in August 2022, leaving behind 7.6 million followers. Macy’s stopped posting in November 2022, leaving behind 850,000 followers. The list could go on.
Selecting a business
To get a sense of how companies responded to Musk and X, I asked Google’s Gemini AI to compile a list of retailers and brands that have accounts with X. The result was a list of 180 companies, often with incorrect information or duplicates of the same company name, including Warby Parker three times.
After removing errors, duplicates, and companies with fewer than 1,000 followers, we created a pseudo-random list of 100 brands and retailers.
Last weekend, I manually recorded each business’ follower count (some from July 20th, some from July 22nd), their last post date, and the number of posts they had made so far in July.
- The 100 companies had a total of 130,134,761 followers.
- Of those, 50 companies had posted at least once in July 2024.
- These 50 companies published a total of 845 posts, with PlayStation accounting for 103 of them.
- Only 24 businesses posted more than 10 times in a month, compared to the 6-10 posts recommended by most social media marketers. Per day.
Several retail brands stood out.
Chanel
Chanel boasts the third-highest number of X followers (13.2 million) among the 100 retail brands. The company is one of many brands to leave Twitter in 2022, apparently out of spite for Musk.
Chanel left the X (then Twitter) platform in late 2022.
That may seem like a lot to ignore, but it’s nothing compared to the power of Chanel’s social media.
Chanel’s US website can be found on Instagram, Facebook, YoutubeLinkedIn, and others, with a combined total of more than 85 million followers.
Home Depot
Home Depot ran a “Halloween in July” campaign with X. 24 posts garnered over 754,000 impressions, 4,800 likes, and 1,300 comments from 438,000 followers.
If those X impressions are worth $0.01 (1 cent) each, then Home Depot’s impressions are only worth $7,540. Development and Publishing Depending on the content, an organic campaign may have been worthwhile.
Magic Spoon
The high-protein cereal brand last posted on X in May 2024 and seemed to be ignoring the platform despite relatively good engagement.
Many of Magic Spoon’s posts received good engagement considering the company’s follower size of X.
Magic Spoon only had 3,315 followers on X, but their last five X posts got over 8,200 impressions, with an average of 1,640. That means almost half of their followers were seeing each post. If The Home Depot could get similar results, they would get 1.1 million impressions instead of 754,000.
Magic Spoon’s X account even has higher engagement (in terms of impressions per post) than a much larger Instagram profile.
As of July 22, 204, Magic Spoon has 407,000 followers on Instagram. Their last five reels have garnered 38,350 views, averaging 7,670 views per reel, meaning roughly 2% of their follower base is seeing each Instagram post.
PlayStation
X is a high frequency social media platform that is most effective when posted to frequently, and by this criteria, PlayStation appears to be the only brand on the list that utilizes X well.
PlayStation frequently posts videos on its X profile.
For example, Musk’s own X profile posted 275 times in the first 20 days of July 2024, nearly 14 posts per day. of The UEFA Champions League, a European football association with around 52 million X followers, posted an average of eight times a day in July, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi also posts an average of six times a day to his 100 million X followers, so the trend makes sense.
By comparison, PlayStation published an average of five X posts per day during the first three weeks of July 2024. With over 38 million X followers, the brand’s last five posts generated approximately 1.6 million impressions within 24 hours.
PlayStation posts are almost all video, which is likely the best-performing format on the platform.
X in numbers
X Platform’s monthly active users are expected to reach 556 million in 2023. Explosive topic.
Facebook has 2.9 billion active users. Tick tock It has just over 1 billion users, Pinterest has 445 million, and Meta X competitor Threads hit 175 million monthly active users a year after launch.
Platform X’s active users are highly engaged, and according to Exploding Topics, active X users spend 34 minutes and 48 seconds per day on the platform — only YouTube and TikTok have a more engaged user base.
| platform | Average time spent per day |
|---|---|
| Tick tock | 45 minutes 48 seconds |
| Youtube | 45 minutes 36 seconds |
| X | 34 minutes 48 seconds |
| Snapchat | 30 minutes 36 seconds |
| 30 minutes 6 seconds | |
| 30 minutes 6 seconds | |
| 23 minutes 8 seconds |
In many ways, X has potential and could represent social media marketing. opportunity. But if these 100 retail brands are any indicator, Return on Investment You can get a job.
