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I’m Not Impressed With FASB’s New Twitter Account

Posted on by Adrienne Gonzalez

When @FAFNorwalk launched on August 4, 2010, it was supposed to be an awesome attempt at connecting government accounting to the 439 people interested in it (don’t trip, FAFN, y’all will get your massive following).

The day after signing up, they mustered up the courage to send out their first tweet:

Welcome to FAF/FASB/GASB! Stay Tuned For Updates.


First of all, we’re not sure if FAF, FASB and GASB know this but Twitter accounts are free so you are totally allowed to get your own. As far as I know, you are even allowed to get several as long as you can come up with an email address for it so there’s no need to share, although that can get messy. What if one of you is trying to tweet about the latest comment period (Disclosures of Certain Loss Contingencies – I’m sure that will garner quite a bit of interesting commentary) while the other wants to talk about new lease rules?

Secondly, is this the best they can do? I’d really like to see some more thoughtful commentary from Norwalk that truly opens the conversation. They can think of this as a comment letter in 140 characters.

Thirdly, what’s up with the one and only person FAFNorwalk is following? We don’t know who the hell @Badwissen is but maybe they are just really into FASBs and @FAFN could totally vibe that when they started their little Twitter co-op.

Lastly, let’s try to work a little better on the turnaround, eh @FAFN? Compliance Week already had an entire story up about new lease rules by the time @FAFN got around to tweeting about it… fine, @FAFN tweeted it around 2 and the CW story went up after 5 but still, with @FAFN’s access to insider information, I want to see @FAFN tweets about lease rules a full two hours (or a day!) before anyone, come on.

If you are looking for a truly dull Twitter follow with zero interaction, @FAFNorwalk is totally for you. Personally I like my accounting feeds with slightly more bite, even if that means a simple @ every now and then.

How’s that for a fucking comment letter?

Earlier:
Wonky Accounting Insight in 140 Characters or Less: The FASB Is Now on Twitter

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Doing It Wrong Twitter Case Study: The Runaway Tweeter

Continuing our series on those in the industry who attempt to use Twitter but fail miserably in one way or another, today’s case study has to do with a tweeter all too frequent among the accounting set: the abandoned account.

You’ve probably come across more than one of these if you’ve attempted to look up certain state societies of CPAs or organizations that appear in Twitter search results but, sadly, feature no picture and maybe one or two tweets from two years ago. It’s obvious, upon checking out the empty bio and single tweet that these accounts belong to tweeters who really wanted to get into the whole Twitter thing but either gave up or got confused and let that drive them away.


I won’t name any names (but one starts with Idaho and ends with Society of CPAs) but one has to wonder what would inspire a media department to go through the trouble of getting their account validated and deciding on that first tweet only to be spooked by the lack of interest or the pure unadulterated excitement of tweeting. What is it? And why bother opening an account in the first place?

We’ve given you guys this lovely piece of advice before (see our interview with New Jersey Society of CPAs’ Don Meyer) but it’s important to remember that you won’t become Ashton Kutcher with 1,000,000 followers overnight and possibly never if you’re tweeting mostly about accounting and all related awesomeness. The niche is small and interest is limited to the couple thousand folks out there who are actively using social media to connect with other like-minded accounting enthusiasts and sources of accounting information. Reactions can be slow to come, if at all, and if you’re trying to break into social media you shouldn’t let the oftentimes frigid audience keep you from trudging ever-onward to meet your social media goals.

You may never get a reaction. You may not get many followers. You may not feel like your message is getting through. But keep doing it and please, don’t end up one of these phantom accounts abandoned in the Twitter junkyard with all the dirty Britney videos and busted dot coms.