Abandoned profiles:
Why it's bad: What's worse than no social media presence at all? Profiles that were created and then forgotten. According to a June 2009 TechCrunch article that quotes a Purewire study, 80 percent of all Twitter accounts have fewer than 10 followers and 30 percent have zero followers. One quarter don't follow anyone else.
These numbers show that people have a habit of creating Twitter accounts and then not using them -- including brands. One reason for this Twitter-drive-by phenomenon is to ensure that nobody steals your username, which subsequently becomes your vanity URL (For example, Dwayne Johnson's Twitter username is "The_Rock_." Therefore his vanity URL is twitter.com/The_Rock_). Brands are worried that other people might squat on what they see as their rightful usernames. It's a fair concern, because I can tell you from agency experience that Twitter can be hard to reach. Right now the service seems to be the pretty girl that can get away with not returning my phone calls. (I'm not bitter.)
If somebody steals a client's vanity URL on Facebook, YouTube, or MySpace, it's not terribly difficult to get it back. But on Twitter it's a different story. If a brand sets up a Twitter account and doesn't intend to start providing updates right away, it should at the very least customize the background and color palate to something other than the default, and then leave a message as the first and only (for now) update that says, "We're getting around to this Twitter thing eventually," or something along those lines.
The culprit: Time Warner. The official Time Warner corporate Twitter account isn't much better than Time Warner Cares, with only 750 followers and 115 updates since April, but the Time Warner Cares Twitter account is just sitting there twiddling its thumbs.
What's more embarrassing is that the company clearly set out to mimic one of the best uses of Twitter ever, Comcast's @ComcastCares account. But apparently around the eighth or ninth mouse click, whoever was creating the account said, "Phew! Forget it. This Twitter thing is too hard."
The solution: The clear answer is to start regularly updating the account and using Twitter in one or more of the many ways that others have found it to be useful. At a minimum, Time Warner needs to create a new custom background, change the default color scheme, and then write an update that informs its clientele of its intentions. Something like, "Time Warner Cares on Twitter is coming soon. In the meantime, please find us at www.website.com."
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