One blog post that really gathered a lot of attention last week was a report released from Nielsen Online, a branch of the Nielsen company that is famous for its TV ratings system. The study, published by Nielsen VP David Martin, suggests that over 60% of all new Twitter users quit the service after one month, and that this retention rate will hinder the service in gaining a mass audience. By comparison, Facebook and mySpace boasted user retention rates over double those of Twitter during their explosive, high growth periods, and enjoy user retention rates of around 70%.
“Currently, more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following 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… By plotting the minimum retention rates for different Internet audience sizes, it is clear that 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.”
The summary offered by the authors of the study is simply, “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.” Some have related this to similar studies published about Second Life, which also enjoyed a wave of massive media hype spurring new users to register, many of whom soon quit or never visited the service again. Do or could some of these same users quit over time, rejoin under different names or accounts, or migrate to third party Twitter apps that mange their message stream on the service? Sure, but more users are sticking with mySpace and Facebook.
Much of the problem is in the hugely inflated touting of Twitter as the next AT&T or the most revolutionary development in mass communication after a century of paradigm changing advances in technology. Now Business Week quotes the Nielsen blog with an article titled: “Twitter is a Fad”. This is further taken up by the “anti-Twitter as a philosophy” people, who can’t stand the fact that people are broadcasting their own banalities and vanities… probably most symbolized by the recent Jon Stewart attacks on the site.
I personally see Twitter as the leading force with Facebook in the development of the “Stream” – the flow of real time information, personal updates, status messages, link recommendations, friend’s messages, business updates, etc. which are bookmarked / followed based on a user’s personal choices and filtered until they become a meaningful and helpful running bulletin board of information. A user may see the Stream as a media channel similar to instant messages, blogs, websites, phone, TV, radio, or other traditional and new media sources, combining many aspects of each but emerging different. There is a leveling of the playing field similar to other digital / viral media, new possibilities of direct communication, an aspect of reality TV, social networking and chat merged with search and data mining.
It was a really big change when so many of the major media sites added “digg this” or “add to delicious” tags on nearly every one of their published pages. Social bookmarking has risen as a major trend, many start ups have vaulted to huge traffic, nice deals, and take-overs on the rise of its popularity… but those sites likely also had similar (or worse) statistics to Twitter in regards to user retention. A good point that validates the Nielsen report would be a look at social bookmarking’s statistics now, after the hype & establishment as a mainstream web publishing medium. My estimate is that massive numbers of users have quit Digg, Delicious, Mixx, and similar sites following their explosive / expansive growth, and the sector will probably average out with around 10% (or less) audience on the web collectively in the near term… what is also being projected (or debated) about Twitter.
With regard to the Stream, Facebook has an obvious advantage over Twitter. Facebook and Twitter both have increasingly open APIs allowing developers to access Stream data. Live search is trending as a very hot topic and many expect it to be the next big development in the search industry. So many mash-ups aggregating data from across so many different social networks, but few have really emerged as high traffic, popular sites. In the end, I see the “microblogging”-Tweet-Status Update format becoming more and more ubiquitous across all web channels and a “game changing” app appearing that synergizes and allows all types of filters and customizations from all the different social media sources.
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Nielsen Online – Twitter User Retention 50% Less Than Facebook & mySpace
