A new survey report by Nileson (March,09) confirmed what we all knew that Twitter is at the top of five fastest social networking platforms growing by 1,382 percent from last year. Twitter users have increased From 475,000 unique visitors in February 2008 to 7 million in February 2009. Nielson also reported that unlike other social networking platform that the largest age group on Twitter was not college students or teens, but adults from the ages of 35-49.This group comprises nearly 42% of the site’s audience at 3 million unique visitors.
But this was all on the brighter side.
Nielson again came up with a report on Twitter last month. “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,” reports David Martin, vice president of Primary Research for Nielsen Online. This simply means 60% of the users or 3 out of 5 twitter users fail to return in the following month.
Martin did compared two other biggest social networking sites MySpace and FaceBoook growth period with that of Twitter and found their retention rates were twice as high. Martin writes “When they went through their explosive growth phases, that retention only went up, and both sit at nearly 70 percent today’.
The low retention rate is actually a roadblock to twitters success in long run and Twitter must plan something enticing enough to make its new birds flock back to nest at regular intervals. Or else the most talked about micro-blogging platform’s sustainability is questionable.
