Retention

In the context of social media, the term 'retention' denotes a platform's, brand's, or content creator's ability to keep their audience engaged and consistently coming back over time. Retention is a critical metric to measure how well an audience might be tethered to a specific content, profile, or community. It serves as an indicator of otherwise subtle shades of audience loyalty.

What is essentially a 'not lost to sight' retention strategy can sometimes be 'not lost to sound' either. This close tie between retention and the social media soundscape can make unsound retention metrics doubly problematic. For instance, if a Thursday 5 p.

m. tweet refers users to an announcement and that tweet ties with the same content shared in an interactive Instagram Story just above the post and on week and month continuums, then there are reasonable pathways to a Thursday visit retweet. So, there are reasonable pathways to 'heavy retweeting.

' There are very few pathways that are not just reasonable but also healthy for retention. At least, there are very few pathway options where mediating retention leads directly to any socially legit content sharing. This 'not lost to sound' scenario can then lead to two things we should consider fruitful: firstly, increasing the chances of not getting unfollowed and, secondly, increasing the chances of being far less socially illegitimate than if we did get unfollowed.