*CLARIFICATION: “Twitter is dying” was a bit glib. I’m not saying that it’s going to close up shop, I’m just saying that it’s “dying” in the sense of devolving into a cesspool of bots, scammers and 4Chan-type trolls.
As those who follow me on any social media platform likely know, I’ve been relentlessly promoting links to my #DemFundraising pages on a daily basis for months now on six different platforms: Twitter/X, Blue Sky, Mastodon, Post, Spoutible and Threads.
Since I post the same links with the same messaging at the same time of day across all six platforms nearly every day, this provides a unique opportunity to experiment with an apples-to-apples comparison of traffic rates by simply including referral code tags with the links.
The table above is a summary of how much traffic I got for my fundraising links via each platform on a per-follower basis (for instance, I only got 70 visits via Blue Sky but only have around 930 followers there, for a per 1K follower clickthru rate of 75.3).
This ranged from as low as 23.6 for Twitter to as high as 82.2 for Threads. Put another way, in December I got 3.5x as much traffic per follower via Threads as I did on Twitter/X. In fact, every other platform ran at least 2x as high.
“Avg. followers” is simply the difference between how many followers I had on the first day of the month vs. how many I had on the last day of the month. As you might guess, I’ve been gradually losing followers on Twitter while gaining them on the other platforms.
I’ll be tracking this every month through November. It should be interesting to see how it plays out as we move into the thick of campaign season. For the moment, however, my takeaway is that while I have between 10x — 55x as many followers on Twitter as on some of the other platforms, a lot of those 51K followers are either bots or accounts which have long since been abandoned.
Alternately, I might be being “shadowbanned” etc. Regardless, the point is that Twitter’s sad decline into a cesspool is definitely happening.
UPDATE: Oh yeah...as long as I’m on the subject, I should also note that I broke $220,000 for Democrats in the 2024 cycle as of midnight last night.
By contrast, on New Year’s Eve 2019, I had raised $120,000 for Dems in the 2020 cycle.
You can find all of my fundraising links in one location here: Blue24.org