Most Retail Brands Ignore X, per Study

A selection of 100 retail brands with more than 130 million combined followers on the X platform collectively posted fewer than 850 times in the first three weeks of July 2024, perhaps confirming retail’s departure from the social network.

Elon Musk purchased Twitter in April 2022, transforming it into X and loosening restrictions around tweets, now called posts.

Not everyone was pleased with Musk’s changes, and by the end of 2022, many businesses had abandoned Twitter. Clothing brand H&M, for example, stopped using Twitter in August 2022, leaving 7.6 million followers. Macy’s left behind its 850,000 followers when it stopped posting in November 2022, and the list could go on.

Selection of Businesses

To learn more about how companies had responded to Musk and X, I prompted Google’s Gemini AI to generate a list of retailers and brands with X accounts. It came up with 180 companies, but in many cases, it had wrong information or repeated a business — it included Warby Parker three times.

After removing the errors, duplications, and businesses with fewer than 1,000 X followers, I had a pseudo-random list of 100 brands and retailers.

Last weekend I manually recorded each company’s X follower count (some on July 20 and others on July 22), the date it last posted, and the number of times it had posted so far in July.

• The 100 companies had a combined total of 130,134,761 followers.
• Fifty of the businesses had posted at least once in July 2024.
• Those 50 had published a combined 845 posts, with PlayStation accounting for 103.
• Just 24 companies had posted 10 or more times during the month — many social media marketers recommend six to 10 posts per day.

A few retail brands stood out.

Chanel

Chanel had the third-largest X following of the 100 retail brands, with 13.2 million. The company was one of the many brands that left Twitter in 2022, seemingly to spite Musk.

Chanel left the X (then Twitter) platform in late 2022.

While that seemed like an awful lot of folks to ignore, it is not much compared to Chanel’s social media prowess.

Chanel’s U.S. website links to four social media platforms — Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn — which collectively have more than 85 million followers.

The Home Depot

The Home Depot ran a “Halloween in July” campaign on X. Its 24 posts garnered more than 754,000 impressions, 4,800 likes, and 1,300 comments from its 438,000 followers.

If each of these X impressions is worth $.0.01 (one cent), The Home Depot’s impressions represented just $7,540 in value. Depending on how much the company spent developing and publishing the content, the organic campaign may have been worth it.

Magic Spoon

This high-protein cereal brand last posted on X in May 2024 and seemed to ignore the platform despite relatively good engagement.

Many of Magic Spoon’s posts experienced good engagement given the size of the company’s X following.

Magic Spoon only had 3,315 X followers but earned more than 8,200 impressions on its last five X posts — 1,640 impressions on average. So nearly half of the company’s follower count sees each post. If The Home Depot could get a similar result, it would have generated 1.1 million impressions instead of 754,000.

Magic Spoon’s X account was even more engaged — i.e., impressions per post — than its much larger Instagram profile.

As of July 22, 204, Magic Spoon had 407,000 Instagram followers. The company’s last five reels had generated 38,350 views, an average of 7,670 views per reel. So, something like 2% of its follower count sees each Instagram post.

PlayStation

X is a high-frequency social media platform, meaning it works best with frequent posts. By that standard, PlayStation appeared to be the only brand on the list using X well.

PlayStation posts often on its X profile with frequent videos.

For example, Musk’s own X profile posted 275 times in the first 20 days of July 2024 — nearly 14 posts per day. Similarly, the UEFA Champions League — a European soccer association with almost 52 million X followers — posted an average of eight times per day in July. Even India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, gets it, posting an average of six times per day to his 100 million X followers.

PlayStation, by comparison, published an average of five X posts a day in the first three weeks of July 2024. With more than 38 million X followers, the brand’s five most recent posts generated almost 1.6 million impressions in less than 24 hours.

Nearly all PlayStation’s posts are videos, which may be the platform’s best-performing format.

X by the Numbers

The X platform had 556 million monthly active users in 2023, according to Exploding Topics.

Facebook had 2.9 billion active users. TikTok had slightly more than 1 billion, Pinterest had 445 million, and Meta’s X competitor, Threads, had 175 million monthly active users after a year of existence.

The X platform’s active users are highly engaged. Again, according to Exploding Topics, an active X user spends 34 minutes and 48 seconds per day on the platform. Only YouTube and TikTok have a more engaged user base.

In many ways, X has potential and could represent a social media marketing opportunity. But if these 100 retail brands are an indication, achieving a return on investment could take work.