NEW YORK: The latest red-hot social media form, Twitter, has a shelf-life for a majority of users, according to Nielsen. The quintessential media yardstick company found that more than 60 percent of Twitter users didn’t check in after a month.
“…or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent. For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention,” wrote David Martin, vice president of Nielsen online primary research.
Of Oprah, Martin writes, “Oprah embarrassed herself on it with a stuck caps lock. That guy from ‘Punk’d’ competed with ‘the most trusted name in news’ for audience. A befuddled Jon Stewart shook his fist at it in anger. Let there be no doubt: Twitter has grown exponentially in the past few months with no small thanks to celebrity exposure.”
Martin said Twitters unique audience was up more than 100 percent in march, but despite the growth, new users grow disinterested in the rapid-fire minutely updates posted by the faithful. Some actual posts:
So-and-so “is astonished.”
So-and-so “is iiiiiiiiiiice creeeeeeeam!”
So-and-so “is talking on Skype.”
So-and-so “heading to the store.”
Martin said “a retention rate of 40 percent will limit a site’s growth to about a 10 percent reach figure. To be clear, a high retention rate doesn’t guarantee a massive audience, but it is a prerequisite. There simply aren’t enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point.”
He then hedges and says Twitter is “still something of a fledgling,” and other such sites possibly had poor retention early on, though MySpace and Facebook had twice the retention of Twitter. Both are at nearly 70 percent.
“Twitter has enjoyed a nice ride over the last few months, but it will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty,” Martin said. “Frankly, if Oprah can’t accomplish that, I’m not sure who can.”
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