60 percent of Twitter users fly the coop every month
Twitter has been growing at breakneck speed, even doubling its users in March alone. However the service can never truly go mainstream if over half of users abandon it after the first month.
Over 60 percent of the users on Twitter won’t return to the site next month. Even Oprah got bored of the service in her first week and hasn’t posted for days.
The truly startling thing is that this audience retention rate is actually an improvement for Twitter. The service had previously been plagued with a greater than 70 percent churn rate.
While it’s quite understandable that not everyone wants to be a twit, these figures stand in the way of Twitter becoming a mainstream service.
Nielsen Analyst David Martin charted the reach and minimum retention of sites across the Web. He found that a site would be hard pressed to reach more than 10 percent of the total Internet audience with such a low retention rate.
Social networks do tend to become ‘stickier’ as they grow in size. The increased likeliness that you’ll know someone on a service and it will become more useful is known as the network effect.
Twitter has gained much of its popularity as of late from celebrities such as Oprah, Ashton Kutcher and others. This means that many of them are joining Twitter more for entertainment than to network with friends.
With Facebook’s most recent redesign borrowing so generously from Twitter’s look and feel, there’s very little reason to log into Twitter any more. Imitation may be the highest form of flattery, but it might also rob Facebook users of the desire to join another social network.
If the primary use of Twitter is to engage with audiences promote brands, it will drown out the conversations between friends. Then Twitter runs the risk of becoming a millions-strong 24-hour infomercial and nobody wants to watch that.
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April 29th, 2009
I can’t help think that Twitter already is one big infomercial, and another vehicle for get-rich-quick merchants to ply their trade. Mark my words, in six months, it’ll be Twitter who? Oh, how funny that Oprah lost interest – ofcourse, she’s got a real life.