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Twitter’s low retention rate could limit growth

April 28, 2009 8:12pm
by David Gelles

The incessant media focus on Twitter (we’re guilty, too), coupled with a parade of celebrity endorsers (from Oprah to Lance) has excited enormous public interest in the micro-blogging service.

Eager to see what all the fuss is about, millions of people around the world are signing up to send their first “tweets.” Unique users of Twitter grew by more than 100 per cent in March, and are now estimated at 14m.

But it turns out most of those users are determining 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 that this strikingly low 40 per cent retention rate poses a significant obstacle to Twitter’s long-term success. “A high retention rate doesn’t guarantee a massive audience, but it is a prerequisite,” he said. “There simply aren’t enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point.”

Comparing Twitter to Facebook and MySpace, Mr Martin notes that when today’s two dominant social networks were emerging, 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,” he said.

As Facebook adapts its service to mimic many of the most popular features of Twitter, these numbers give good reason to think that Facebook, with its 200m users and robust retention rates, has little to fear from the flurry of interest in Twitter.

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April 28, 2009 8:12pm in Internet | Comment

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