« Social Networking up 83% in the US this Year
Social Media Presence on the Rise with Small Business »

Twitter: Explosive Growth VS. Retention

As we all know Twitter has grown immensely in the past few months due to major media hype and droves of celebrities jumping on the social media band waggon.  According to Nielson, Twitter will face an “uphill battle” due to the void between explosive growth and retention.  Twitter’s retention rates are around 40% month after month of people who actually return.  We are seeing people set up profiles and play around for a few days or weeks then never return.  So how will Twitter combat this and give user’s more reason to keep coming back?

Studies show that sites like MySpace and Facebook even had better retention rates in their early days…even during explosive growth periods.  Often you will see fast growth lead to lower retention but these two sites experienced the opposite:  fast growth lead to even higher retention.  See the chart below:

social_network_loyalty

Notice the consistency of MySpace and Facebook over Twitter.  Of course, there could be many reason for this.  Obviously, Twitter has fewer “bells and whistles” than the comprehensive social networking platforms like Facebook.  Over time they will need to give users more functionalities (which I am sure they are working on) to keep them on the site longer and coming back every day.  Of course, Twitter has made quite a name for itslef as a powerful social media marketing tool, but for it to continue to hold that title it will have to retain users.  Like anything else, establishing user loyalty will be the key to their long-term success.

Related Blogs

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Mixx
  • Google Bookmarks

Tags: ,

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 at 5:00 pm and is filed under Others, Social Media, Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Leave a Reply