It is becoming evident that Twitter is something of a flash in the pan. New evidence published today by the US research house Nielsen Online shows that in excess of 60 per cent of Twitterers are fly-by-night characters who use the technology in an unsustainable burst of over-enthusiasm for a few weeks and then abandon the free social networking site in less than a month, writes Martyn Warwick.
David Martin, the VP of Primary Research at Nielsen Online says, "Twitter's audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month's users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 per cent."
And that lowly figure is actually an improvement on the retention rate achieved before the technology was taken up by "celebrities" (many of whom, it transpires, actually employ ghost writers to churn out their allegedly spontaneous guff). As David Martin says, "For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter languished at below 30 per cent retention."
Now, given Twitter's undeniable if erratic popularity, the company's future would seem likely to be dependent on a never-ending supply of new users signing-up to give Twitter a go even as the majority of last months afficionados churn away to another fad.
This will be a difficult trick to pull off. Twitter itself won't release usage figures but Nielsen Online estimates that the site had in excess of seven million unique visitors in February this year.
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