Twitter breeds quitters

It has been observed that while people are joining the micro-blogging site in large numbers many do not stick around for long.

David Martin, Nielsen Online's vice president of primary research, says "People are signing up in droves, and Twitter's unique audience is up over 100 per cent 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.”

Twitter’s popularity

Twitter enjoyed tremendous popularity, especially when Oprah Winfrey came aboard and also after Ashton Kutcher amassed more than a million followers. ComScore's graph declared that the company demonstrated a spurt in users from 500,000 to 14 million over the past year. According to estimates, visitors to Twitter.com increased 95 percent in the month of March from 9.8 million to 19.1 million.

David Martin further said, "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 per cent retention.”

Twitter's spectacular growth gained a lot of media attention. Right from Oprah to a NASA astronaut, President Barack Obama to Britney Spears, there are many who have not only been Twittering but talking about it a lot.

Comparison to MySpace and Facebook

However, in comparison to the social networking giants Facebook and MySpace, Twitter's retention fizzles out. According to Neilson, both the Facebook and My Space now have about 70 percent retention rate. He added that as their audiences rose so did their retention rates.

"Twitter just doesn't seem to have a whole lot of stickiness to it," said Ezra Gottheil, an analyst at Technology Business Research Inc. "People join Twitter ... and then it has to be an on-going commitment. Twitter's charm is that it's immediate and instant. The minute you get busy, its usefulness fades."

David declared that "Let there be no doubt: Twitter has grown exponentially in the past few months with no small thanks to celebrity exposure.”

However, he added that it will not be able to sustain its popularity without a high degree of loyalty from its users. “It is clear that a retention rate of 40% will limit a site's growth to about a 10% 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.”

About Twitter

Twitter was created three years ago as free social networking and an internet-based service, that enabled the users to send and read other users updates known as "tweets" which could be sent to computer screens or mobile devices.