Celebrities can be valuable to advertisers, but so too can the people who follow them on social media websites. According to The Nielsen Company, 64 percent of adult U.S. Internet users who follow a celebrity also follow a brand – this means the celebrity follower is four times more likely to follow a brand than the average U.S. adult online.  Additionally, Nielsen found that such fans are also more likely to offer advice and opinion to fellow online consumers. This is particularly the case when it comes to entertainment topics where 32 percent of celebrity fans online provide advice on movies (making them 44% more likely than the average online user to do so), and 28 percent provide guidance on music (56% more likely) and television programs (34% more likely).

Fans of celebrities are also valuable consumers in other areas of online – particularly when it comes to transactions or purchases.  One quarter also used the web to conduct personal banking transactions and manage their credit card accounts, more likely to do so than the average adult online. Top online purchases among these online fans included clothing/shoes/accessories (18.2%), music (13.8%), and books (13.6%).

Top online activities among fans of celebrities included emailing, paying bills, and of course, social networking.  Of these top online activities, celebrity fans were significantly more likely than the average adult online to comment/post on social networking sites (86% more likely), view consumer generated video (83% more likely), visit a social networking site (67% more likely) and play online games (45%  more likely).

Note: Nielsen’s findings are based on data from @Plan Release 4 2010. @Plan is a quarterly survey of approximately 36,000 U.S. Internet users age 18 and older fused with Nielsen’s NetView Internet usage from 3rd quarter 2010.

The size of the U.K. Internet audience grew by five percent from 36.9 million people in May 2009 to 38.8 million people in May 2010. Of these 1.9 million new Internet users, 1.0 million (53 percent) were at least 50 years old.

Men over 50 were responsible for most of this growth, accounting for 722,000 (38 percent) new British Internet users followed by women over 50 who accounted for 284,000 (15 percent) new users.

Following the 50+ age group, women aged 21-34 accounted for 272,000 (14 percent) new British Internet users and ‘tweenage’ girls aged 12-20 who accounted for 231,000 (12 percent).

“The Internet is getting older in more ways than one. Not only is the medium itself maturing but the audience is shifting towards older age groups,” said Alex Burmaster, Nielsen’s vice president of global communications for online. “This growth is a reminder, if one was still needed, that it is very much a form of media utilized by all age groups. The fact that one in four Britons who use the Internet today are 50 to 64 years old proves it is no longer the sole preserve of the young and technical literati.”

The types of websites where people over 50 years old are most likely to be found are a varied mix of health, video, community, travel, fashion, genealogy, cooking and greeting cards.

People aged 50 or over account for 31 percent of people online. Health website RealAge has the highest concentration of people this age amongst its visitors – 89 percent are aged 50 or over. RealAge is followed by video site Flixxy (80 percent) and community site Saga – of which 78 percent of the audience is at least 50 years old.

Burmaster added, “This age group have a wide appetite when it comes to the types of sites they are using to supplement the interests and needs they have in the daily lives. Consequently, a number of brands across a range of industries, particularly travel, are showing the rest what a valuable medium online is when it comes to reaching a desired audience who haven’t grown up with the Internet.”

Our recent post about how the majority of people who use Twitter wind up abandoning the service received a lot of great coverage and feedback. We also received a healthy amount of criticism from the Twitter community who were concerned that our study sold Twitter short because it failed to take into account applications and other websites that feed into the Twitter community.

So, as an update, we went beyond just Twitter.com, adding in more than 30 websites and applications that feed into the Twitter community including: TweetDeck, TwitPic, Twitstat, Hootsuite, EasyTweets, Tumblr, and many others.

The results verified our initial findings: about 60 percent of people on Twitter end up abandoning the service after a month. The year-long retention curve looks very much the same as the one for just Twitter.com.

Clearly, this exercise illustrates the power, passion, and influence of the Twitter community. There is no question that this finding would not have spread as quickly as it did without the engaged and vocal user base that has adopted Twitter as a way of life.

Keep the feedback coming, no matter how you feel about this issue. We look forward to continuing to provide you with timely and engaging insights on this and other topics.

twitter.com/nielsenwire/

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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/

Meanwhile, Olympics fans who logged on to the Internet to follow the events around the clock set a new online precedent during the Games,  Nielsen Online reported Wednesday.

Olympics Web Portals
In the U.S., NBC, an official broadcast partner for the event, drew an average of 18 million (week one) to 18.9 million unique visitors (week two) to its Olympics website during the Games.

Yahoo’s Olympics section drove more traffic than NBC’s site, but visitors to NBCOlympics.com spent twice as much time on the site and looked at three times more content than visitors to Yahoo’s Olympics site, according to Nielsen.

In China, approximately 85% of all Internet users who went online during the Games viewed Olympics content, according to ChinaRank, a website ranking platform hosted by the Internet Society of China and a Nielsen Online partner.

On average, 62 million unique browsers viewed Olympics content each day, and during the course of the Games, Chinese Internet users viewed more than 11.4 billion pages of content across 200 Olympics-related sites tracked by ChinaRank.

Sina Olympics was easily the most popular Olympics Web portal among Chinese Internet users, drawing an average of 30.9 million unique browsers each day.  Tencent Olympics (17.9 million average daily browsers) and Sohu Olympics (12.5 million average daily browers) were, respectively, the second- and third-ranked Chinese Olympics Web portals.

Online Video
NBC’s Olympics video site drew more than 1.2 million unique visitors per day, with dramatic traffic spikes around noon on work days.  Online video use was significant during the Beijing Games, but it did not appear to negatively affect TV viewing in the U.S., which remained at record levels during the Games.

Olympics Buzz
U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps’ dramatic gold-medal winning streak triggered a barrage blog chatter.  Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt also wowed Olympics fans, but Phelps, who received five times more online buzz than Bolt, proved unbeatable in the blogsphere.

Online Advertising
U.S. Olympics team sponsors drove 9.9 billion online ad impressions before and during the Beijing Games (August 4 – 24).  AT&T, General Motors, and Bank of America were the top three advertisers, accounting for a combined total of more than 1 billion impressions.

View Nielsen’s complete Olympics online findings.

View the full press release.

View the full press release.