Last week, Nielsen Online released some data about Twitter’s less than impressive retention rate. While the micro-blogging social media site has been bathing in media attention for it’s spectacular growth, Neilson’s David Martin wonders if it isn’t all just a fad.
Currently, about 60 percent of new Twitter users do not come back the next month. Martin projects that with that poor performance, Twitter will never be able to reach more than 10 percent of Internet users. Of course having a 10 percent Internet reach is nothing to turn your nose up at, but I still wonder if Neilson is selling Twitter short.
By his own admission, Martin’s conclusions might be a bit premature. Every time we discover a new way to interact on the web and on social media, it takes a certain amount of time to understand what it all means.
Using Twitter, I asked people what they thought about the low retention rate. Apparently many people have had a common experience that readily explains the trend of people signing up and then not returning the next month. It just takes a month or two for people to “get” Twitter.
For example, when a friend, Jenny Johnson (@cheekyandswank), told me I should join Twtter, I did happily. Unfortunately, I didn’t get it right away, so I stopped. About two months later, I came back to it and understood more fully what the possibilities were. I’ve been hooked ever since.
I’m not alone. @ryansmiller wrote: “Took a while to get into Twitter & I joined in ‘07. Users need a breakthrough moment where they “get it” to become regulars.” And @drinklibslc referred me to this article in PC World in which Robert Strohmeyer (@robertstrohmeyer) writes:
“I typed my first tweet at 2:45 PM on March 15, 2007, punched in six more the following day, and then took three months off before coming back. And even after returning to Twitter that July, I didn’t really realize what the service could do for me beyond broadcasting my latest blog posts to a modest circle of my friends and colleagues. So it went for another year or so before I had that ah-ha moment that opened the service up to me.”
Admittedly, all this is anecdotal and may or may not hold true for the majority of Twitter users and Twitter quitters. Still, it seems that Twitter has an unusually long gap between when people start using it and when they start understanding it and feeling comfortable with it. Considering that, it’s probably too early to tell if Twitter is a fad or not, and it’s too early to start projecting it’s potential Internet reach. My guess is that Twitter will be around for a long time in some form or another, but we’ll have to wait and see.