In the wake of eMarketer’s suggestion that Twitter’s growth (U.S. adults) could nearly double to 20 million users in 2010, Nielsen has an interesting post suggesting Twitter’s growth could be stalling.
Nielsen based its thesis by looking at Twitter’s retention rates – the number of people who continued to use Twitter the month after they signed up. Neilsen found that only 40% of new users stuck around, which would keep growth to 10%. This is hardly the kind of growth one would describe as explosive, and it’s certainly goes against the grain that Twitter’s growth is unbridled.
Nielsen said:
“Maybe we’re jumping the gun. Twitter is still something of a fledgling, and surely some other sites that eventually lived up to Twitter-like hype suffered from poor retention in the early days. Compare it to the two heavily-touted behemoths of social networking when they were just starting out. Doing so below, we found that even when Facebook and MySpace were emerging networks like Twitter is now, their retention rates were twice as high. When they went through their explosive growth phases, that retention only went up, and both sit at nearly 70 percent today.”
Nielsen’s research is eye-catching and offers some much-needed against-the-grain thoughts about Twitter and how fast it’s really growing.
The only pushback I would offer is that Facebook and MySpace are probably easier services to keep using because they offer users a variety of things to do. Twitter, meanwhile, is a one-trick pony so that if microblogging doesn’t capture your imagination, it’s more unlikely that you’ll stick around.
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Is Twitter’s Growth Stalling?
In the wake of eMarketer’s suggestion that Twitter’s growth (U.S. adults) could nearly double to 20 million users in 2010, Nielsen has an interesting post suggesting Twitter’s growth could be stalling.
Nielsen based its thesis by looking at Twitter’s retention rates – the number of people who continued to use Twitter the month after they signed up. Neilsen found that only 40% of new users stuck around, which would keep growth to 10%. This is hardly the kind of growth one would describe as explosive, and it’s certainly goes against the grain that Twitter’s growth is unbridled.
Nielsen said:
Nielsen’s research is eye-catching and offers some much-needed against-the-grain thoughts about Twitter and how fast it’s really growing.
The only pushback I would offer is that Facebook and MySpace are probably easier services to keep using because they offer users a variety of things to do. Twitter, meanwhile, is a one-trick pony so that if microblogging doesn’t capture your imagination, it’s more unlikely that you’ll stick around.