You don’t need to be everywhere

In April, Twitter slapped a label on NPR’s account, calling it “U.S. state-affiliated media.” While NPR does receive some funding from grants and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, these public funds amount to less than 1% of the broadcaster’s budget. But this label that Twitter applied to NPR was the same that the platform used on heavily influenced outlets, including Russia’s RT or China’s Xinhua.

NPR wasn’t happy. So they left.

On April 4, the radio network stopped posting. And a few days later, they effectively said, “go find us somewhere else,” and shared links to its newsletters and other platforms.

Despite Twitter’s new management claiming record engagement, this boycott has turned out to work just fine for NPR. According to an internal NPR memo, even though they had more than 10 million followers between different accounts, website traffic dropped by only a single percentage point.

About the negligible traffic changes, Gabe Bullard writes in Nieman Reports:

“There’s one view of these numbers that confirms what many of us in news have long suspected — that Twitter wasn’t worth the effort, at least in terms of traffic. ‘It made up so little of our web traffic, such a marginal amount,’ says Gabe Rosenberg, audience editor for KCUR in Kansas City, which stopped posting to Twitter at the same time as NPR… [R]ecognizing that social media is not a key to clicks seems like a correction to years of chasing traffic through outside platforms.”

It’s not worth the effort. Ten million subscribers, and it’s not worth it. If NPR doesn’t need to be everywhere, you and your brand probably don’t as well.

We live in a world of finites. We only have so much time, and only so many resources, to devote to anything we’re doing – and maintaining an active presence on twelve different social media channels can eat up a lot of both. Instead of doing all of them half-assed, it’s far better to either commit or punt.

If you can kill it at TikTok, great, then go do it. But if you’re going to post a couple of janky clips and let your profile collect dust for months at a time, then you’re better off just giving up on the platform. This is true even if the platform delivers success for others – nothing will magically work for you if you can’t commit to doing it right. (And it’s doubly true if the platform is already fading, like Twitter.)

These days, when I talk to anybody who doesn’t have a gargantuan marketing budget, I tell them to do just two things. Choose one social media platform to play on. Then, focus on building an email list.

Do those first, and later on, if you have the bandwidth, add more. But as NPR just found out, you’re not missing out on all that much if you’re not everywhere.

Personally, I’ve written several times about the ongoing demise of Twitter – and talked about it many, many more times with colleagues and students. It still bums me out that such a valuable and unique place can be so easily ruined. But despite that, I still felt a pang that drew me towards the app long after I should have left. I still tapped that familiar blue icon over and over and over.

Then I got my new phone. When my muscle memory led me to tap on that icon, my actual memory failed me – what was my password again? I could have looked it up. I could have changed it. But instead, I just didn’t. It’s not worth it.