NOTE: See the important update to this story here.
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David Martin, Vice President, Primary Research, Nielsen Online
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. People are signing up in droves, and Twitter’s unique audience is up over 100 percent in March. But despite the hockey-stick growth chart, Twitter faces an uphill battle in making sure these flocks of new users are enticed to return to the nest.
Follow Vs. Follow-through
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.
To understand why this poses a problem for Twitter, check out the chart below. 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.
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.
Follow us: twitter.com/nielsenwire/
Great article!
I signed up on Twitter a couple of months ago and I have been on it sparingly since. I really do not see what the big deal with Twitter is. Myspace and Facebook have a similar “status update” section and Twitter took it a step backward and created a “status update” only website.
Twitter is great for this generation of narcissism where so many people out there think we actually care about what they are doing right now.
I’m still trying to decide whether Twitter is worth my time to keep up a steady stream of tweets, as well as worth readers’ time to get them. But when people like Oprah and Kelso start making a big deal out of it, it stops being “cool” to me anymore.
Hi David:
This is an interesting question – but I suspect that you are looking a less than half of the relevant data. If I look at my use http://twitter.com/tomob , and the sources of most people who I follow then your numbers don’t make any sense.
Why? Well, you refer to it in the article. Far less than 10% of my activity on twitter happens at Twitter.com. This is true of the people I follow as well. So any metric that is built on visits to http://www.twitter.com will be very inaccurate.
I think retention is a huge problem for Twitter, but I don’t think your approach answers the question. Perhaps you could examine the number of tweets over time to get a better answer.
I think the most revolutionary think about twitter is perhaps the open API which lets anyone build a client or app for twitter – which while making it much more useful – definitely diverts traffic from the Twitter website.
TO’B
Very interested in how these retention rates are calculated. Are they return visitors to the website? Or is it based on the percentage of user accounts with no updates in one month? The latter seems like the more accurate approach – given that even though I use Twitter a fair amount, I can’t think of the last time I’ve been to twitter.com — which is, I think, a big strength of theirs. That said, it’s completely true that the flocks of new users aren’t necessarily all sticking… but just wondering how you take the fragmented nature of the service into account.
I signed up for twitter a year ago ( @amystark ) , tweeted for a few days, and quickly lost interest. In October ’08 I revisited the social media platform in preparation for a speech about emerging social media tools. At that time I began studying -in earnest- the way twitter alliances are formed, the vast amount of information exchanged, and the rhythm of power tweeters so that I could speak intelligently about this social media platform.
The definition of a “twitter quitter” as used in this post’s title is unclear. Do you define quitter as someone who deletes their account after a few weeks, or simply stops tweeting? It would be great to measure the tweets of “quitters” to see if they return after five months like I did. I know my experience is not unique which makes me wonder if your data may be a tad short-sighted.
Amy Stark – Twitter Ninja for #Indiana
Are these numbers for the Twitter website only? If so, how do you think these numbers would change if you take the large number of Twitter users into account who use third-party clients like Twhirl or Tweetdeck?
This is the first time I think I’ve seen much publicly available retention data, and it’s incredibly interesting. I had no idea Nielsen had that data. Keep it up!
/ Nabeel
i’ve been on twitter for over a year now, ….
whatever floats your boat…
i like it :)
Twitter itself has nothing to do with people returning to the service. Twitter cannot change anything or do anything.Twitter users get out of Twitter what they put in. I think some people are signing up and expecting amazing things to somehow magically happen. That’s not how it works. You have to do the legwork. Make the connections. Learn the lingo.
The meteoric growth of Twitter does not need to be sustained. The users who understand what it is for – sharing information among like-minded people, networking, evolving communication, building two-way relationships – are thrilled with it and will continue to support it until something significantly better comes around.
Many of my new “followers” do get lost soon after they start following my involved tweets..the tweets are not generic but i thought that was because my stuff is more heady, intellectual. I tracted some of my people and found that their accounts had been removed by Twitter staff; for God knows what reason.it could be that some newbees want to break the rules and find they cant and go away. maybe as this grows it will attract more ethical people. the colleagues i recommend use it like it..i think it is more and faster monitored than most sites. i still like the idea of people donating or being awarded small pieces of stock or shares for great tweets; for content is what is going to attract the public; most older folks dont get it; but they dont know you can watch tv on a cell
I think that the 40% are just those that have taken the time to find the real value of Twitter. There’s so many possibilities, but it’s not a “build it, and they will come” platform. Whether using it for business or personal reasons, Twitter does require a time investment. If you’re not willing to put that in, you’ll more than likely leave within the first month! And then there’s those that just don’t understand the basics of using it and won’t take the time to learn. A blog that I recommend can help with that – http://www.mellonco.com/blog – it’s the basics of twitter for small business and those just starting, and you don’t have to search a thousand blogs to get the step-by-step.
Interesting stats. I think Twitter’s main problem is the question it asks people to answer (What are you doing now?). It’s easy for people new to Twitter to reject it and see the responses as random babble like the Twouble with Twitters video.
Have a basic intro to Twitter presentation here if you’re interested:
Twitter. WTF?
Thanks for the stats, Nielsen!
Mark
This research is interesting. As per Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, if you think of Twitter as the long tail. It has it’s hits in different categories which possibly makes up the 40% retention rate as discussed above.
I believe what will happen is there will be other Twitter like networks that will sprout up. Initially, offered by bigger companies in competition with Twitter and eventually realise that the only way to survive is to have a twitter like service which is niche-specific (i.e. hits).
Just my two cents,
Armand Aguillon
Are you tracking actual usage of Twitter or just visits to the site? I never visit Twitter, I use it through clients on my iphone and desktop – so am I in your 60% drop off even though I use it every day?
[...] according to the Nielsen Wire blog Twitter is suffering from some of the lowest retention numbers of social media services. Where [...]
Interesting post.
I’d be interested to know a bit about your data gathering methods though.
Pretty much every twitter user who keeps using the service rapidly moves from using the website to using a desktop/mobile client like Tweetdeck, Tweetie, etc.
This means that if you’re only measuring website visits (as opposed to API calls, which is what any client software uses), your stats would be skewed.
That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of casual users try it and stop; there are plenty of comments supporting that in and around mainstream media articles on the subject.
Whether or not that really means anything in terms of Twitter’s future viability is another question altogether, given that it has already succeeded in retaining a large number of prominent members of society.
I completely agree. Great post.
I think Twitter is useful for a consumer to ‘follow’ people they don’t know. Like following the CEO of Zappos, Best Buy, Communispace, and Twitter is interesting. I don’t need to be their friend on Facebook as I don’t want to see their kids’ pictures. As a CMO, it gives me a way to communicate on business terms with our customers, but not give them access to seeing all my friends and my vacations.
I don’t think Twitter is useful for consumer to talk to other consumers. Facebook is better for that. It’s richer. Your friends and family can see your status updates, but also the photos that go with it and the activities you are doing on FB.
FB just needs to partition of ‘professional’ communications to replace LinkedIn and Twitter.
[...] to a Neilsen Report released today, a full 60% of Twitter users who sign up fail to return to the website the following [...]
[...] pesquisa da Nielsen Online divulgada no site, a taxa de retenção no Twitter é baixa. Apenas 40% dos usuários voltam a [...]
Great to see a fresh new perspective
It’s no surprise the crowd would eventually fed up and starts wondering what else they could do on Twitter. Fact is, what people are mostly enjoy on Twitter are the public communications, meeting new people, the informations shared.. once the connection is formed, they may extend the relationship further to business partners, blog readers, friends, possible in another platform. Besides, not many of us who has the luxurious time to spend hours on Twitter; unless there’s another explosive factor. Twitter is at its prime right now, but we all know it would end one day, when another better alternative, a replacement is found.
@wchingya
Social Media/Blogging
[...] that the fuss isn’t about all that much, after all. A full 60 per cent of new Twitter users fail to tweet again the following month, according to Nielsen vice president of primary research David Martin. Mr Martin makes the case [...]
At last… an article about twitter that is not caught up in the Raa! Raa! mania
What amazes me are responses like David’s. He points out:
“…this generation of narcissism where so many people out there think we actually care about what they are doing right now”.
Yet he takes the time to post his 2 cents on this site about something he doesn’t care for. Does we care what he really thinks? Why did he even bother? Oh I know…..
It takes a narcissist to know a narcissist.
Thanks for clearing that up David. Hypocrite.
Is it possible that it’s actually in Twitter’s best interest to not grow too much, too fast? If instead of rushing out shiny bells & whistles to try to retain the random passerby, they concentrate on creating a solid foundation, wouldn’t that be in their long-term interests? A website doesn’t have to do everything all at once. I like that Twitter does one thing and does it very, very, very well. Those of us who use it daily, and use it properly, aren’t leaving and I think that would be more important to the long term sustainability of Twitter. Growth just for growth’s sake is silly.
Facebook is a “closed service” and Myspace is crap – always have been, always will.
With “closed service” I mean that FB isn’t reaching out – you update on FB, some of your friends might read the update, and comment on it. That’s basically it.
Myspace is mostly useful for bands, most of the other personal pages on Myspace just looks so bleedingly horrible that I can’t stand to watch.
Twitter, on the other hand. Twitter does the exact opposite. With Twitter, it’s not you friends (okay, them too, of course) you post for – it’s for the whole world to see – you post something on Twitter, and soon after, it’s picked up by someone else, who ReTweet it, and there you have it – the ball is rolling.
Twitter has searchfunctions, and the invention of #hashtags also helps to keep the convos together. Lots of people have gotten noticed on twitter, and then gone to be on radio, TV-shows and being picked up by the news-crowd.
Twitter is about short updates, yes, but it doesn’t have to be “small-talk”. Important issues are discussed in depth on a daily basis. US elections? Check. Swineflu? Check. War across the globe? Check. P2P, TPB and filesharing? Check. It’s all there, and it gives you the opportunity to reach out to people you never have met before!
It’s about search capabilities. Whomever gets Twitter, get’s internet search “2.0″, if you will. What’s the big deal? Your searches will be in real-time, not indexed like say, Google, who is rumored to be in talks with Twitter. Money to be made off of apps, etc., as well. And, most importantly, it’s an all around effiecient communication tool that uses very little network bandwidth. Very good for information viral-y(?) and quickly quickly. Micro$oft actually announced a beta of something very similiar today, with an emphasis on local communities and safety awareness. I wonder how they’ll screw that up. But, I digress…Twitter is powerful and awesome…give it a chance.
When I first signed in Twitter I didn’t see its value either. I went idle for months, with the buzz around me, I went back, and today I feel addicted to it.
As much as easy and simple Twitter interface is, as much as it is hard to realize the real value behind it. One has to try it for a while in order to figure it out.
Excuse me, but I see a big methodological flaw in this article. You do not explain what “fail to return” means. Does it mean that people don’t log in anymore? That they don’t twitter actively anymore? That they don’t read their personal timeline? What about DMs? Without this clarification, your data cannot be interpreted in any way. I don’t see the message in this post.
From where do you have the data for your estimation?
With all respect, i doubt about the reliability of your study in this case.
There are indeed new ways to feed and read a twitt, e.g. with a cellular API, a service in another application etc.
As a consequence, it is no more required to visit the site itself in order to “twitt-in or -out”.
So it would be interesting to know if you could considerate this in your study. Thank you in advance for a complement of information.
I’m not surprised to read this. I have tried Twitter myself and gave up the same day. It’s full of nothingness really, something like posting for posting sake. It’s great to have the technology that allows us to exchange ideas, opnions, and communicate better but it’s also abused by many who all of a sudden have to compete for’influence’ and ‘followers’, and where the number of so called friends on someone’s Facebook or My Space page is meaningless. The meaning of friends and influence is totally trivialised. The whole Twitter thing is trivialised so it’s no surprise that it’s not growing. Overproduction has always resulted in crisis. Overproducing is the disease of capitalistic sociaty where everything revolves around prestige: who gets more money, more jobs, more friends, more brownie points, more followers, more visitors, etc, etc. The real meaning and value are lost, completely. And, I do apologise if my honest opnion offends anyone but I felt that constructive criticism would be appreciated.
As you point out, it remains to be seen whether Twitter can retain its incoming users. New tools such as Tweetie – not to mention the emerging ecosystem of tools that connect with or build upon Twitter – may change the equation somewhat.
Twitter isn’t self-explanatory, mostly because there are so many different ways of using it: connect with friends, follow unfolding discussions, keep co-workers in the loop, increase your visibility, discover interesting people, plain old spamming, contributing to the polarization of extremes (ref Cass Sunstein’s article), virally spreading information, questionable facts, opinion and nonsense.
Whether or not Twitter succeeds, microblogging and status updates have been given a boost among early adopters and the general public alike. Almost every little bit of social software out there now includes status updates and I believe we are likely to see this communication format stay with us for some time to come.
It would be interesting to see a (likely impossible to compile) statistic of the growth in status messages, intention broadcasts and short-form public dialogs across services. That might be a hockey stick I could believe in. Mind you, I’m not saying this is an exclusively good or bad thing, merely a shift in how we gather and share what we know, think and wonder about.
Thanks for sharing!
What exactly did you measure? Just the return visits on the site http://www.twitter.com? A lot of users are using a mobile or desktop program connected to the API of twitter and not the website itself. That might influence your conclusion.
I’d love to see the actual numbers. Getting value from Twitter requires some investment. There’s also probably lots of “get that twitter name now” with the idea of maybe using it later.
However if regular users are starting to give it up after needing to spend too much time there versus the value it would be a real problem.
The “Hype” doesn’t come from Twitter. As Evan Williams has said publicly “Nobody gets Twitter (at first).” It will thrive to the extend that it proves useful. It takes time to see whether it will be valuable for you. The gestation period is longer than a month. So it’s not clear what % of these dormant users have quit vs. those who will start to get it.
Note that Oprah has continued to Tweet.
Twitter is not a web app like Myspace and Facebook. Twitter is a phone app. The fact that it occupies space in html is secondary to it’s actual purpose. Use loyalty? What’s that? People are not canceling accounts in droves, are they? It’s simply a matter of having an interest at a point in time. Interests change like underwear, Twitter is a vehicle for that.
The comments here speak for themselves, many new twitter users really don’t get what twitter is about. That doesn’t really surprise me. I wrote about this to a fair length on my blog (http://bit.ly/3kwg2) but here’s the quick facts:
Twitter started as a simple service, a media that doesn’t really tends toward any particular use, except in the way it sports (and encourages) brevity. What really made twitter shine is some GREAT users and a community of likely-minded individuals that were able to inform, teach, show and tell 140 chars at a time.
All the Best!
@simmessa on twitter.
Are you including in this analysis people who use twitter from external sources (Desktop clients, iPhone apps, mobile) or only visits to http://www.twitter.com? Most users of twitter rarely, if ever, visit the actual twitter website, so I don’t think you can get reliable figures about retention based on page views. In an analysis from earlier this year, Mashable reported only 30% of tweets are posted from the twitter website itself, with the rest coming from 3rd party sources. (http://mashable.com/2009/02/07/twitter-clients/). Better luck next time.
I like both Facebook and Twitter, but use them for wildly different purposes.
Facebook is for friends and family, to keep up with their lives (although I’m finding that I like some of my friends LESS after wading through their self-promotional and inane updates).
Twitter is to keep up to date with news/commentary in my industry, and connect with them on a business basis. I find so many interesting and useful articles (like this one) that I would never find on my own, and I find many people with whom I’d like to do business.
Just be careful who you follow, and regularly cull anyone who fills your Twitter stream with crap. You know who they are.
Analysis of static MySpace vs. dynamic Twitter is apple v. orange. Real question:how do those who stay use it?Signup & retention are so 90s.
Has anyone had problems convincing friends to use twitter when they ask you what its all about? I laid out my argument for them and none of them were sold on it. Maybe its my poor salesmanship.
To me, the best thing about twitter is links, gaining knowledge and staying “up to date” (whatever that means for you). So, when people I know say “twitter is just facebook updates” or the people on tv say “twitter is for people who want to share when they had the (ubiquitous) ham sandwich),” I wish they knew what it really was about, to me anyways.
Someone make a website called “whyshouldiusetwitter.com” and post the 5 big reasons, in great simplicity, in big type, so I can send my friends there.
In addition to the inevitable time waster of “creeping”, MySpace and Facebook always had multiple layers to explore (upload photos, write-stuff about yourself, set-up events,show your fav books, music, send emoticons, try and “pick-up” people, etc). Facebook and MySpace are meant for less frequent but lengthier periods of engagement. Twitter is meant for high frequency but shorter periods of engagement. That’s why Twitter offers fewer avenues to personalize your page then FB and MySpace. They sit in two different realms and that’s also why when FB tries to add higher frequency services such as FB chat, it doesn’t really work. I don’t know if it makes sense to compare these platforms to one another.
Twitter is great for businesses to get a specific message to a wide audience in seconds. The Twitter search feature is also a great way to track down leads if it’s used correctly.
I’m a newbie-only started on twitter about three months ago after Rachael Maddow mentioned it on her show. I use it to write about what I’m doing, like, dislike or just whatever i want.I follow interesting people and get lots of news.I like to experiment with writing technique,creative writing in 140 characters.I hope my followers (did it the old fashioned way!)find me interesting as well.I love it.
It’s not really that surprising that Twitter’s been so celebrity driven. It’s a format and a platform that lends itself to people who other people are interested in.
Knowing what my friend is thinking is only really relevant to him and me. Knowing what Britney is thinking right now is a gossip point which gives me social currency with others (ok, some others!) I’m quite private with my own thoughts, but I’m a bit of a voyeur when it comes to other people. It’s kind of an extension of reality TV in the role it performs, at least in my life, and maybe other peoples.
It’s like you read right from the Multichannel Forensics playbook. I love it — a perfect application of Multichannel Forensics, great work!!
Nice article covering what’s happening in Twitterville. When putting these stats together do you take into account people who use twitter without ever going to twitter’s site? At http://www.twitter.com/acemediaworld we started using twitter clients like TweetDeck, twhirl and cell phones. These clients gives us more flexibility then the actual twitter site.
We’d be interested to know if these hits are being recorded as well. Let us know at http://www.twitter.com/acemediaworld.
I thoroughly enjoyed this data – I do have some questions about the definition of ‘quitter’: delet’s acct, never tweets again etc. I also have some questions about usage of Twitter. There are many utilities out there that allow people to tweet to their twitter without actually visiting the site. So again, back to the definition of quitter: never visits again, never tweets again (whether visiting site or not) or deletes account.
In any event – the only reason I enjoy twitter is to use it as another type of reader. I use google reader for my rss feeds, and twitter is just another version of this. It’s oddly amusing to be followed but it’s meaningless. I have built up my linkedin profile, facebook profile and many of the people I work with easily – and at the end of the day it’s just stat manipulation, like playing a big ‘real’ social MMOG.
I think like anything else, it takes time to build an audience. I search for people in the city I work in, start following a few at a time & wait to see who follows me back. I am still very new to twitter.
I first signed up for Twitter in April of 2009. I didn’t get it, I was preoccupied with the 50-state tour I was one, even though that would have been an awesome platform for Twitter. The first year I was on Twitter I believe I “tweeted” 3 times.
I never got it. Until I met @charliecurve and @tomcurve.
I tried it again one year later and was addicted. It has brought me clients, web traffic, job offers, friends, and just 5 minutes ago a guy offered to buy me lunch. What an awesome networking tool.
Yes, there are a lot of stagnant accounts, but I believe that will change, as mine was stagnant for a year and now I’ve managed to gain the interest of nearly 500 followers. I think that’s pretty cool.
People have to find out how it benefits them. It takes some strategy, some learning, and some understand. But there is no help manual for Twitter because it is different for everyone depending on their profession, hobbies, and what they want to come of it. Facebook and MySpace (I deleted my MySpace account today) are easy for anyone to use who seek no benefit or gain without realizing the potential to be had.
Not only users, but the people at Twitter itself, are understanding more and more the power of it and will only be capturing a bigger and bigger audience as they find my ways to use the information.
[...] click here for Nielsen [...]
[...] Nielsen reports that 60% of Twitter users quit within the first month, which is quite surprising to me. [...]
[...] guess I can use the term similarly for Twitter’s current situation. According to Nielsen, 60% of Twitter users fail to return after a month. This is certainly not a good sign for the [...]
[...] Quitter, I Say Good Riddance Stat tracking firm, Nielsen, released a report today stating that more than 60 percent of Twitter users stopped using the free social networking [...]
[...] from the folks at Neilsen… the same jerks who said that no one was watching Jericho… more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month. They see this as a real stumbling block to long-term growth. This really doesn’t surprise [...]
[...] Twitter is still a fad, and according to a study out today, it looks like it’s popularity may soon fade. Conducted by Nielsen Online, it focuses on [...]
[...] recently posted some interesting statistics on their blog about the high rate of abandonment of new Twitter users. According to their research, more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the [...]
[...] and never go back to it. David Martin, Vice President of Primary Research at Neilsen Online offers some insight into what that means on Neilsen Wire. And what it means, basically, is that, despite the general giddiness about Twitter’s growth, [...]
[...] Have you seen the latest Neilson reports that Twitter users fail to come back after a month at a seemingly high rate? I think one reason is because they don’t fully understand the depth and breadth of usefulness Twitter can offer. Like a quick pass through any collectibles shop, you ‘re likely to miss the gold that is co-mingled with all the garbage. Currently, more than 60 percent of 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. [...]
For me, the usefulness of Twitter is in finding relevant &/or interesting material quickly. A steady stream of non-stop updates (ie, more than once every few hours) is useless and annoying to me; but I’ll bet those who are ‘always on’ are more likely to drop out when real life begins to interfere.
[...] to a recent article by Nielsen Online, more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month. Or Twitter’s [...]
[...] the ratings firm Nielson released a report on Twitter’s new user retention rate and the numbers aren’t good. With only a 40% retention rate, as defined as users returning to [...]
[...] Nielsen Wire Blog via Information [...]
[...] Nielson reported yesterday that Twitter has a retention problem: According to a recent study, Neilson says that 60% of Twitter users fail to return the following month which translates into a 40% retention rate; pre-Oprah they noted that Twitter retention was 30%. This was widely noted on Twitter. [...]
[...] 40 percent,” writes David Martin, vice president of Primary Research for Nielsen Online, in a company blog entry. “For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent [...]
I’m not calling your mental abilities into question, but some other people might so I’m just trying to help. I’m a helper.
People don’t sign up for Twitter to go back to http://www.twitter.com every 5 minutes. They access twitter by pretty much any other source they possibly can (see Tweetie (iphone) etc.), especially via mobile devices – and here’s where they are calling every other social app to the mat. I’m concerned that they don’t have a clearly profitable business model, but in the meantime, I’m happily tweeting away on my iPhone.
Sincerely yours,
Concerned.
[...] April 30, 2009 1:11 Posted in category Uncategorized On Wednesday, Nielsen Wire released a report on the state of Twitter growth. Well, growth is good, Twitter’s churn rate is high, so getting [...]
what the deal with twitter? To me twitter is different to facebook! This comparison doesn’t make sense for me.
I’ma a facebook user, and i use it to keep on tarck with my friends and i use twitter for collegueas
I think twitter is still a morphing landscape. Isn’t it hard to quantify the growth potential at this stage? After all you have third party applications which some are making real good use of this tool to target specific groups.
I’m anticipating what changes or enhancements may be introduced. :)
To add to the current challenges faced by twitter to retain users it has its own stack of ever increasing unresolved known issues. http://help.twitter.com/forums/31935/entries
I wonder how many unknown issues exist and twitter takes it too long to resolve issues.
I always had a gut feeling that Twitter was a silly fad, and finally some hard data comes out to support that. My guess is that the 40% coming back are 10% early-adopter geeks, and 30% narcissists with A.D.D.
The difference between blogging (not a fad), and Twitter (fad) is that blogging is a way of sharing short, well-formed thoughts, whereas Twitter is a way of sharing tiny, ill-formed thoughts. And most ill-formed thoughts are just noise. They get boring very quickly.
Tweet tweet… tweety tweet tweet… tweeeeeeeeet…
Great post! I think Twitter retention and getting that Twitter curve up over the long run is all about content. Whether its consumers or peers, content needs to be interesting and compelling. I “unfollow” tweeters who tweet about having coffee, watching a great sunset, or getting kids from school. This just does not motivate me to continue following them, it doesn’t provide me with anything of value. I think if tweeters get that, less users would drop out.
Twitter will become a big part of the social web and a major source of information on the web at the user level or application level, period. Why? Because of its transparency and simplicity. Whatever you publish it goes right there chronologically. Current search algorithms abandon a big chunk of the web because of some unknown, well-kept secret policies, while Twitter search gives you everything out there. Let us decide which info worth looking at and not let corporate policies or personal preferences control the data flow. Let people use or build applications that make sense of free flow of information (all the information).
FINALLY
FINALLY, some data to support what we all know. TWITTER IS NOT FUN TO USE.
David, This is great data, and I think it clearly encapsulates the current “Twitter hype” and what lies ahead. Is there a possibility of viewing the specific percentages in the first chart?
I agree with Fredric. This article contains little information about how they are measuring return visits and therefore retention. If it is purely traffic it is wrong to compare to Facebook and MySpace as they are not accessed through as many 3rd party clients as Twitter is.
I can’t figure why anyone uses Twitter. Yes, I’ve heard all the hype but I don’t care what David Gregory from Meet the Press eats for breakfast (which is the first Twitter I ever received). In comparison, Facebook keeps me connected to everyone from my far-flung cousins to my college freshman roommate. FB adds value to my life. Twitter just wastes my time.
Unfortunately, many twitter users are flooding the system with tons of pointless tweets. This repels most adult users. Even with apps like TweetDeck, the system can become unusable.
quite frankly i find all the other social networks a waste of time. if i need to keep in touch with someone, i’ll call them up or else, as a last resort, email. facebook is ok for sharing pictures, but how does it help actually ‘connect’ people? twitter, on the other hand, proves to be a great help in keeping up with my profession, asking some great people for help. i can choose to be a silent onlooker into somebody else’s professional life, or make some noise in the crowd. yes there is spam, but at least i can decide the kind of spam i want. this is the choice that twitter gives me. twitter, recently has become a bookmarking service, an alternative to google reader, and an amazingly passive way to interact with people.
Twitter is great for this generation of narcissism where so many people out there think we actually care about what they are doing right now.
-the bottom line
I signed up for Twitter pretty much when it first came out. And then I did nothing with it for almost a year. Now I’m a regular.
Your article resonates with my personal experience on Twitter, after the initial excitement of being able to ‘talk to’ celebs a la Mr and Mrs Kutcher, the sheer volume of frankly boring noise has led to me puttin’ that little birdie back in its cage.
To my mind comparable sites offer much greater social networking functionality and relevance = greater retention.
birds annoy me… so it is not surprising that “tweets” are equally as nerve racking.
[...] so, according to Nielsen data that shows 60 percent of people who use Twitter one month, even at its peak popularity, don’t [...]
Currently, more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month…
To understand why this poses a problem for Twitter, check out the chart below. 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 perce…
[...] storm of media coverage over those events brought millions of new people to Twitter; although how many of them remain on the service is still up for [...]
[...] in 140 or less characters, quick took the world by storm. Unfortunately, but just as I predicted, Twitter is failing. As the Nielsen article states, Currently, more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to [...]
[...] to a new Nielson study roughly three out of every five Twitter uses ditch the service after a few weeks, thus hampering [...]
Twitter is nothing more then live text and spammers, at least a couple of High IQ,s thrown in. Twitter sells it, its changed, those guys are on the beach with a Pina Coloda laughing, . Like the Hula hoop, a fad, but eventually somebody will build another one better. Take the money and run by Twitter founders, I would too.
[...] ny undersøgelse fra Nielsen Wire viser, at 60% af de tilmeldte Twitter-brugerne ikke bruger tjenesten en måned efter. Uden igen at [...]
I still think the Facebook vs. Twitter argument is misguided in that many feel they have to identify the One Social Media Device That Conquers All. Whether for personal or professional purposes, there’s no reason why people can’t use one tool such as Facebook for some reasons (such as cool apps for connecting with friends) and Twitter for other reasons (such as involving your brand in relevant conversations).
The long-term growth argument isn’t completely solid either. Only 5% of people are on Twitter right now but as it’s predicted that this will grow to close to 10% within the next year or so, we have to give Twitter a fair look over the long haul to see if it can sustain this growth. But that kind of jump is nonetheless impressive.
Finally, since when is it a bad thing if not everybody gets Twitter? Could some people dropping out of the mix actually lead to better quality conversations in the overall community of very active participating Twitterers? That doesn’t sound like a bad prospect to me either.
Sorry for the lengthy reply, I just believe the jury on Twitter is very much still out.
[...] Twitter users give up? According to a study by Nielsen Online, more than 60 percent of new Twitter users give up on the service a month after signing up. Jeff [...]
[...] is partly because people do not understand what it is supposed to achieve. Proof of this was just published by Nielsen where they found that more 60% of new Twitter users do not return to the site the following month. [...]
[...] of Twitter. However, many are still not big fans. Yesterday a client sent me a link to a recent Nielson report which indicates that “more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following [...]
[...] Twat’s Up with Twitter? Filed under: Uncategorized — susandarbywrites @ 4:13 pm Tags: Facebook, social networking sites, twitter Whew, what a relief! I feel much so better now knowing I’m not the only Twitter quitter. Seems 60% of people who sign up on the site never stick around to play – that according to a Nielsen survey. [...]
I’m on Twitter, but I really don’t look at it everyday. I just find some of the information worthless. I don’t care that someone is going to take a shower, eat a sandwich, or go workout. That doesn’t make a difference in my life.
If I’m going to log in and read, I’d much rather go to Facebook and find my friends who are able to write more than a few words.
I love Twitter, it saves my company hundreds of pounds per month in that I can reach out across the world to people who are interested in public speaking. It brings a lot of traffic so because my SEO now rate top 3 in Google, I can spend less on PPC. Thanks Twitter.
Oh My God….
you get fanboy’s/fangirls EVERYwere…it is amazing! why do people feel the need to defend a website!!! they aren’t a public company, you have no money invested in it! WHY DEFEND IT? this guy is just posting numbers. the numbers speak.
are yo people afraid that you made the “wrong” choice in social networking or something? its just sad…
Oooh la la…more than 100 comments already to this post…shows you can love twitter..you can hate twitter…you can question twitter…but u cant ignore it for sure!
[...] of the service’s users account for more than 90 percent of tweets. The study dovetails with recent analysis by the media research firm Nielsen asserting that 60 percent of Twitter users do not return from [...]
[...] none of them are great unless there’s a strategery to go along with them. I mean, only about 40% of U.S. Twitter users go back to it the following month. Probably a good chunk of those are folks just linking to someone else’s press [...]
[...] isn’t bad enough news, along comes a Harvard Business School study, hot on the heels of this report that suggests 60 percent of Twitterers don’t last more than a month, that says 10 [...]
[...] bail on Twitter after a month. [...]
[...] Ashton Kutcher & John Mayer love the Twitter dynamic. Similarly, it is also unsurprising that over 60% of users abandon the service within the first month. After all, we aren’t all [...]
40% of twitter users tweet? That’s fantastic! Why isn’t that the headline?
What’s the percentage of people who read blogs that actually write a blog?
What’s the percentage of people who watch youtube videos that actually produce videos?
What’s the percentage of people who read the newspaper that actually write articles?
What’s the percentage of people who watch TV that actually produce a TV show?
Twitter with it’s real-time and easy to participate in approach is one revolutionary user-participatory media bringing democracy to news filtering.
[...] statistics may not be meaningful on month-to-month basis as Twitter has a high turnover rate. NIELSEN ONLINE released a Twitter study (and an update confirming their original study) that shows 60% of US Twitter users that sign up one [...]
[...] is reporting that Twitter’s growth may indeed face hurdles based on current numbers that document follow [...]
[...] millones de personas se han hecho alguna vez una ficha en twitter… pero según Nielsen, más de el 70% lo abandonó en el primer mes. En conjunto sólo un 10% publica [...]
[...] they posted interesting enough to share it with their followers. If Nielsen is to be trusted, 60% of U.S. Twitter users stay for less than a month. If it were possible to examine the habits and streams of those who leave, I would venture a guess [...]
[...] 29, 2009 // The reported low 40% retention rate for Twitter really got me wondering. I’ve been on something of a [...]
http://www.slate.com/id/2219995
I haven’t been enticed to follow any of the social media. I don’t have a blog, a MySpace or a Twitter, and someone has yet to convince me my rants are worth following. I have a Facebook but I never use it, it’s worthless for even the tiniest social interaction. I also post in an art site, and that’s all the netwise interaction I’ll ever need.
Which is the point of getting into social networks online? Is Twitter that big a deal because people have to write less in order to be read more?
If that’s it, I’ll never sign up.
[...] Nielsen Online reported in April that more than 60% of Twitter users fail to return after their first month. By comparison, Facebook and MySpace, when they were same age as Twitter, had retention rates nearly twice as high as Twitter’s. [...]
I cannot believe this is true!
[...] people off by educating them on the possibilities of real-time search will drastically improve the retention rates that have plagued Twitter thus far in its growth (still its the #1 growing social network, however). People will start [...]
[...] it’s worth mentioning the fact that about 60% of Twitter users quit after the first month. (source) I’ll go out on a limb and speculate that the average attention span of a twitter user [...]
[...] Here’s something quite interesting from Nielsen: [...]
[...] and bounds, how many new users keep using Twitter? That’s a bigger question, one which Martin addressed in April. That Neilsen report found that Twitter’s retention rate is between 30-40%, compared with [...]
[...] Over 60% of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month [...]
[...] Check out the full Nielson Wire study here. [...]
[...] many continue to question Twitter’s staying power and hacking vulnerabilities, the social networking site continued to grow in both size and [...]
[...] study compliments recent analysis by the media research firm Nielsen. Nielsen’s claim is that 60 percent of Twitter users do not [...]
[...] to a recent study by Nielsen Online, Twitter’s audience retention rate is currently about 40 percent. Which means that about 60 [...]
[...] to a recent study by Nielsen Online, Twitter’s audience-retention rate is currently about 40 percent. Which means that about 60 [...]
[...] yes, tweeting is the phenomenon that was supposed to die, um, about four months ago? Still, it remains more present than ever, even with options to declare what latitude and longitude [...]
[...] should come as little surprise, given Twitter’s alarming monthly churn rate of 60%: if 6 out of 10 new users fail to return after the first month, you would expect this fallout to [...]
[...] past year, but it looks like they have just as high drop off rate as other groups mentioned in an April 2009 Nielsen post. It is nice to know that the majority of teens surveyed don’t feel that a lack of data [...]
[...] that Twitter is definitely a fad but one which cannot be ignored. It kind of reminded me the old Nielsen study (back in April) which was much touted as a ‘twitter is a fad’ research (even though it [...]
[...] Twitter research: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/twitter-quitters-post-roadblock-to-long-term-growt… [...]
I agree with the comments about Twitter being a waste of time, or what’s the point… I’ve joined Twitter, reluctantly, about a month ago, and really, who cares about most of what people tweet about. Rarely is there an actual “real” connection. It’s kind of like being surrounded by billboards. Even those that send out “positive messages”, most are somehow trying to sell themselves. I really dislike all the sales hype. And, some people tweet so often, it makes it very difficult for me to find the tweets of the folks I really want to read.
I have a blog post on this subject too, because it’s becoming such an issue for me. Yup. I don’t think I need a Twitter life.
[...] 5:06 pm I joined Twitter some months ago, and then quickly became one of 60% U.S. Twitterers that Nielsen found didn’t return a month after joining. But now I have to do some [...]
[...] babble‘ and a number of other respected outlets claiming that the Twitter fad won’t last. It’s fair to say that 1,600% growth can’t continue for ever, but there is room for a [...]
[...] only thing certain about Twitter may be its uncertainty. The microblogging service is booming, but more than 60 percent of users quit Twitter after a month. Partnerships are rumored, as are acquisitions, but so far these remain mere [...]
[...] and that I would be able to play it. Sure, maybe Hasbro is foolish. They think a generation of people who can’t even stick with Twitter for a couple weeks will pour hours of their time into an online version of a game that is notorious for never being [...]
[...] musicians create a twitter account and give up on it rather quickly. Nielsen reports a 60% twitter quitter rate within the first month of using the service. Another study, by [...]
[...] excited about the hype without understanding what to do once signing up. Then, they quit. In April, Neisen reported that 60 percent of twitter users quit after the first [...]
[...] Online recently blogged that Twitter only retains about 40% of the people it attracts. Nielsen says that post received a [...]
[...] had higher retention rates right from the start, but Twitter has been experiencing crazy growth (http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/twitter-quitters-post-roadblock-to-long-term-growt…). Undoubtedly, people will join a new thing and try it when it is getting as much attention as [...]
[...] for everyone who has very little time and a short attention span. However, data conducted by Neilson Online, which measures Internet traffic, suggests more than 60 percent of Twitter users stop using the [...]
[...] So that brings us down to 40,000 potentially effective followers in TK’s community. The latest Nielsen numbers show that 60 percent of Twitter users quit after the first week, that’s one-third the [...]
[...] to Nielsen Wire over 60% of Twitter users fail to return the following month after signing up to the service. That [...]
[...] As Neilsen reported last spring, more than 60% of Twitter users fail to return to the site the following month. [...]
[...] signed up, tweeted a few times, and have yet to return to the medium. Twitter retains only about 40% of its users from one month to the next. The fact that streaming audio is keeping ¾ of its audience active on a [...]
[...] Media-hyped Twitter? Finally, a way for the media to maintain their viewership indefinitely, radiating their persona at all hours of the day. It has become such a hot topic that completely unrelated subjects are directed to the site (Can I Twitter that? Is that as good as Twitter?), even when studies have shown that a lot of it is pointless and the majority of new users don’t stick around. [...]
[...] Anyway, on this cold, dreary rainy Spring day, see Jon Stewart’s rail on Twitter below. Very funny and very accurate for now? Like all new marketing tools, I’ll continue to participate and monitor. I still encourage you to jump in…the water’s fine, have fun and don’t sweat it. FYI the churn rate on Twitter is crazy. [...]
[...] study presented by Nielsen in April this year reports that more than 60 percent of U.S. twitter users fail to return the [...]
[...] clipped from blog.nielsen.com [...]
[...] clipped from blog.nielsen.com [...]
[...] thought. The good folks at Nielson have reported that six out of 10 people who sign up for Twitter quit after a month. What’s the matter, Twits? Figured out that reading and writing the most [...]
[...] Even though Twitter is experiencing exponential growth, the same research indicated that large numbers of users are abandoning Twitter after a short period of experimentation. [...]
[...] to NeilsenWire, more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return from month to month. For the 10% of us [...]
[...] study presented by Nielsen in April this year reports that more than 60 percent of U.S. twitter users fail to return the [...]
[...] that Twitter is definitely a fad but one which cannot be ignored. It kind of reminded me the old Nielsen study (back in April) which was much touted as a ‘twitter is a fad’ research (even though it [...]
[...] like many social networks, it seems many people lose steam with the service. Stat tracking firm Nielsen reports today that a full 60% of users who sign up fail to return the following month. And in the 12 months [...]
[...] The debate over whether Twitter and Facebook are fads or sustainable businesses has yet to be resolved. Their popularity is indisputable but whether Twitter, in particular, can avoid erosion of its user base, let alone continue its impressive growth, has been questioned. [...]
[...] also represent a recession in new user registration and retention?In April, Nielsen released a study that observed over 60 percent of new Twitter users failed to return the following month, creating a [...]
[...] people who have been using it for a while. Problem is, according to market research firm Nielson, 60% of Twitter users quit within the first month. Why so many Twitter quitters? The problem probably lies in the fact that immediately upon having [...]
[...] 140 or less characters, quickly took the world by storm. Unfortunately, but just as I predicted, Twitter is failing. As the Nielsen article states, Currently, more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to [...]
[...] reported in April that 60% of new Twitter users drop off after a month. In response to the objection that [...]
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