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Industry Trends

How Loyal Are Twitter Users?

By May 6, 2009July 30th, 2023One Comment

It is a well known fact that Twitter has grown at an explosive rate lately – their unique audience was up 100% in March – however, the site does not seem to be very addictive to its new users.

A recent study conducted by Nielsen Online has shown that only about 40% of newly registered users return to the site in the next month. In other words, about 60% of new users desert Twitter just one month after joining it, in spite of the number of celebrities flocking to the site.

Such low retention rates could present problems for the long term growth potential of the site, because the number of new users joining the site is bound to reduce after a certain time. The new user growth rate would not remain anywhere near the current 100% after the initial growth spurt has died down.

It may still be too early to make such predictions regarding the growth of Twitter. Comparisons are bound to be made between Twitter and the popular social networks MySpace and Facebook.

A comparative study of the three reveals that in their early stages, MySpace and Facebook had retention rates almost double of what Twitter is enjoying at present.


Source: Nielsen Wire

Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim argued that the findings by Nielsen were not be accurate, as they may not have taken into consideration the fact that many Twitter users switch from the Web interface to one of the several third-party applications.

To correct this error, Nielsen then added over 30 web sites and applications affiliated to Twitter, including Twitstat, Hootsuite, TweetDeck and TwitBin. Their findings were reconfirmed – retention rates even with these sites was almost as low as it was for Twitter.com.


Source: Nielsen Wire