Editor’s note: this is part of a series of Point/Counterpoint entries that present differing views on a single topic.
According to Nielsen, “Twitter.com was the fastest-growing Web brand in May 2009, increasing 1448 percent year over year, from 1.2 million unique visitors in May 2008 to 18.2 million in 2009”. And according to Nielsen that growth is beginning to slow with only a 7% increase from April 2009.
No one really questions the growth of Twitter, what is in question is the value proposition and revenue model.
But some interesting research released this spring by Nielsen shows 60% of people that sign up for Twitter, stay around for a month and then quit. Nielsen had a ton of comments and complaints about their analysis not including the applications that people can use to update twitter, especially mobile apps. Not to be foiled or proven wrong, Nielsen went back and redid their analysis including those applications. The results? 60% quitters.
I’ll say it, I’m a Twitter Quitter. I signed up, I have followers and I follow people. I don’t really get any information from Twitter that I can’t get from Facebook or RSS feeds. So I quit. What do you think, is Nielsen on the mark?
There’s no doubt that a 40% retention rate is great, but I am more curious as to why people abandon Twitter. Why do you think people aren’t coming back to Twitter after their initial exploration of the service?
Remember the Borg from Star Trek? That fictional psuedo-race described by Wikipedia as “an interconnected collective, the decisions of which are made by a hive mind”? Welcome to Twitter, kids.
All community-based sites roughly follow the 1/19/80 pattern, with 1% of members contributing content consistently, 19% contributing occasionally, and 80% just watching. The rule absolutely holds true for Twitter, but what @ev and @biz should be worrying about is that this is one case where it’s not fun to watch.
Micro-memes pop up hourly on Twitter, and its new home page only exacerbates the problem. As an average Internet user, am I really going to be pulled in to yet another social network by something called #mussumday? Or TrayCyrus? Or #followfriday?
As Twitter’s demographic continues to evolve from being a small community of geeky early adpoters, to essentially MySpace, you just get more and more people shouting in a tiny room, asking if Jeff Goldblum is really dead. And most Internet users are just going to say, “No Thanks.”
Great topic. Twitter is bound to be fad of the year. It will take its place alongside podcasts, second life, video advertising, and RSS feeds as the next big thing in marketing that never really tool off. Someone should go back and look at all the emarketer spend and usage projections of each of those and run a variance analysis. I’m betting that the projections vs actuals are way off.