Why do Twitter followers and Facebook fans suddenly stop being your friend?

Your social media marketing strategy seems to be going well; your Facebook brand profile has attracted plenty of likes, your intelligent, timely tweets have won you an army of Twitter followers, but then, quite suddenly, things start to go wrong. Your Facebook fans have started to de-friend you, while on Twitter, your core followers are nowhere to be seen – and it’s happening at an alarming pace. But why do people break their relationships with brands in the social media space?

Interactive marketing services company ExactTarget has researched the issue, and here we present some of the foremost stats and tips to encourage your online relationships to thrive.

Of the 73% of Facebook users surveyed, a majority of 64% claim to be ‘fans’ of, or have ‘liked’ a company or brand.

Despite this, 55% of those fans find they no longer want to view your posts, and 51% rarely, if ever, visit your business page on Facebook after liking it.

Excessive posting accounts for 44% of the decisions to ‘unlike’, while 43% of Facebook users feel that their account is too crowded with brands.

38% say marketers aren’t offering fresh content, while 26% say claim that all they were interested in were offers and discounts.

Of the 17% of consumers with a Twitter account, 56% have followed a company.

Almost half of those have however stopped doing so, citing repetitive, boring tweets (52%), tweet streams overcrowded with marketing posts (41%), and over-frequent posts by companies (39%).

Some 27% only followed a brand on Twitter to take advantage of a one-off offer, while a similar number found the amount of offers to be inadequate.

So far, so challenging. But the good news presented by the study is that Twitter users are perfectly comfortable with using Twitter as a platform for interacting with brands. As well as being the most active and connected of all social network users, they are far less likely to ‘dump’ brands once a connection has been made.

According to the study, only 41% of Twitter users are likely to opt out, compared to 55% of Facebook users and a whopping 91% of email users, making it the social medium of choice for ongoing conversations.