by Yasmin Carrillo, Nathan Carpenter, and Tony Alva
With the recent activity with Twitter being taken over by Elon Musk, the American social media company as been experiencing some hardships. From lose in revenue to lose in the number of active users. Twitter’s continued slippery slope is shown to affect the Bloomington-Normal area.
According to Sheila Dang’s Exclusive: Twitter is losing its most active users, internal documents show, “Twitter is struggling to keep its most active users – who are vital to the business.” With the changes insighted by Musk these past few months we are beginning to see the effects. Users leaving twitter is a sign of the lack of trust with the change of ownership and the social media platform changing drastically when one man is making the decisions.
Twitter has two kinds of users: Monthly Active Users (MAU) and Daily Active Users (DAU). Those that interact and open the app on a daily basis compared to those that open and interact with the app not as frequently.
Market Realist, “Twitter had 217 million mDAUs compared to 192 million at the end of 2020. The company describes mDAUs as ‘people, organizations, or other accounts who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given day through twitter.com, Twitter applications that are able to show ads, or paid Twitter products, including subscriptions.'”
The table below showcases the Bloomington-Normal Twitter users postings between August 2021 and October 2022. With Elon Musk officially purchasing Twitter on October 27 (Stokel-Walker, 2022), there were conversations of purchasing the social media company months prior which created a frenzy of questions and concerns on Twitter.
From September 2021 – October 2022, Bloomington-Normal saw an overall loss of 527 active Twitter accounts posting original tweets to the site, or a 17.6 percent difference in total monthly users.
Some of the largest changes in users occurred between October 2021 and November 2021, where there were 270 less users. Then the following month there were 246 less users. The largest drop occurred from May to June, where users decreased by 287 users.
We do see increases throughout the chart. From February 2022 to March 2022 there were 119 more users. Then in July 2022 to August 2022 there was an increase of 142 users.
| Year | Month | User Count | Monthly Change |
| 2021 | August | 2898 | NA |
| 2021 | September | 2981 | 83 |
| 2021 | October | 3008 | 27 |
| 2021 | November | 2738 | -270 |
| 2021 | December | 2492 | -246 |
| 2022 | January | 2482 | -10 |
| 2022 | February | 2465 | -17 |
| 2022 | March | 2584 | 119 |
| 2022 | April | 2475 | -109 |
| 2022 | May | 2589 | 114 |
| 2022 | June | 2302 | -287 |
| 2022 | July | 2223 | -79 |
| 2022 | August | 2365 | 142 |
| 2022 | September | 2363 | -2 |
| 2022 | October | 2454 | 91 |
Factors to take into consideration that can affect the decline in user count can be during the the months of November and December the student population leaves the Bloomington-Normal area for Thanksgiving and winter break. Between May and June, graduation occurs and students go back to their home towns for the summer. Factors for increase for August can be the student population returning to campus.
The SMACC will continue to monitor Twitter activity in Bloomington-Normal, as well as Central Illinois to see whether these changes persist.