60% of Twitter Users Quit After a Month
According to the Neilsen Wire, 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.
The lackluster retention rate of 40 percent suggests many people don't see the point in spending time on Twitter, which allows anyone to write about what they're doing or what's on their mind in messages, or "tweets," limited to 140 characters.
There simply aren’t enough new Twitter users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point.
While some of the tweeting is entertaining, thought-provoking or helpful, much of the chatter can be quite banal as people update when they are eating, drinking, puking and even defecating.
Neilsen says: Maybe we’re jumping the gun. Twitter is still something of a fledgling, and surely some other sites that eventually lived up to Twitter-like hype suffered from poor retention in the early days. Compare it to the two heavily-touted behemoths of social networking when they were just starting out. Doing so below, we found that even when Facebook and MySpace were emerging networks like Twitter is now, their retention rates were twice as high. When they went through their explosive growth phases, that retention only went up, and both sit at nearly 70 percent today.
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. Frankly, if Oprah can’t accomplish that, I’m not sure who can.
