Twitter Suffers From Low User Stickiness: Nielsen

A study conducted by Nielsen reveals that more than 60 percent of Twitter users fail to return the following month.In other words, Twitterers are quitters.

This means twitter audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent.

The study also goes on to say that retention rate of 40 percent will limit a Twitter site’s growth to about a 10 percent reach figure,Reach is the measure of a site reach or use among total internet audiences.Although a high retention rate doesn’t guarantee a massive audience, but it is a prerequisite. There simply won’t be enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point.

The chart below explains the minimum retention rates required by Twitter to attain different Internet audience sizes:

The critics might argue that low retention rate is due to the early days hype-syndrome but even when compared with the boom period of Facebook and Myspace,Twitter still fails to score points.

The study clearly states that retention levels at social network behemoths was double of Twitter even in their early boom phase and that retention only went up, and both sit at nearly 70 percent today.

The chart below shows the retention rate comparison with early years of Facebook and Myspace.

Few Oberservations:

• The study might be incomplete as it is done only with U.S visitors and could also have ignored the users shifting to third party apps after getting comfortable in using Twitter.
• The low retention rate might also be a cause of frequent spamming as many twitter users create multiple accounts and are using service only for the sake of traffic.This increases the unhappiness factor amongst its users.
• Another missing feature like advance user search may also be prompting users to quiet as they are unable to strike quality conversation due to the dilemma of who to follow on Twitter.The learning of Twitter lingo, with its “RT” retweets and #hashtags may also have aggravated the retention rate factor.

The retention rate for social behemoths has always been impressive but in Twitter’s case it might be different as the retention rate would continue to show high volatility and may not inch forward to a large extent.

In the meanwhile,Nielsen says Twitter attracted a U.S. audience of 13.9 million in March, an increase of more than 20-fold from roughly 500,000 users at the same 2008 juncture.

Twitter has also enjoyed a meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty but if it wants to monetise its services it would require to have a “stickier” collection of users.