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April 30, 2009
Twitter's Retention Numbers Exposes Loyalty Problem
With all the buzz about Twitter lately, Nielsen Online exposes a problem: retention and loyalty. It seems that 60% of Twitter users never return the next month to Tweet. Compared to the retention rates of MySpace and Facebook, Twitter is lagging:
They also did some fancy pants math to show the correlation between retention and Internet reach:
What do you think of the Nielsen data? Is Twitter ultimately in trouble? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Posted by Nathania Johnson on April 30, 2009 3:31 PM
Comments
Russ Henneberry May 7, 2009 2:43 PM
In my experience, Twitter retention is very low.
The majority of "join requests" I get are actually marketers who are trying to get me to follow them. Of the sincere "join requests", it is easy to check them and see their activity. If you check back a month later, you will notice that a majority of them are now abandoned accounts.
Probably the biggest reason for people abandoning Twitter, is that there are insufficient conversations. Too many "tweets" are merely statements, outbursts or comments. Not enough of them are actual conversations. This means that the members are not part of a community, the bond is weak.
Joan Fibonacci May 18, 2009 6:56 PM
I agree with the retention rate and there can be many reasons.Twitter is still introduced through marketing, it has not yet become a part of everyday life like email, so i think it will take sometime for people to get addicted to twitter. Twitter is mostly used by marketers and on ad hoc basis per project requirement. so it is possible that once the project finishes up people just dispose of the extra account.
khmohsin May 19, 2009 8:10 AM
I'm not suprised by this. It seems that you either get addicted to Twitter or it fades away for you. I think this has to do with two factors.
#1 - There isn't a slew of emails a la Facebook that keeps the Twitter service in your face all the time.
#2 - One of the things that makes Twitter easy for me to use is my iPhone. There are a half dozen apps that make using Twitter on the go easy. Even though the iPhone (and it's kin) is fairly prevalent now, it is far from being a technology that the majority of us are carrying.