Twitter retention is around 40% according to Neilsen.
Twitter growth can continue on it's torrid pace says Neilsen the audience research firm.
Neilson just released a report titled:
Twitter Quitters Post Roadblock to Long-Term Growth.
In the report, Neilsen concluded that Twitter's retention rate was 40 percent. In other words, 40 of people tweeted in the month they logged on to Twitter.
Neilson also painted a very bleak picture for the future of Twitter.
Twitter has enjoyed a nice ride over the last few months, but it will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty.
Jesse Farmer is a computer programmer and entrepreneur in Palo Alto, CA. who writes about social networks, viral marketing, and analytics for 20bits.com.
He reaches an entirely different conclusion. After analyzing Neilsen's methods, and sampling 100,000 Twitter users, here is his conclusion
My data show that Nielsen’s report is too superficial and unfairly penalizes Twitter, underestimating Twitter’s long-term retention rate by as much as 60 percent. And because most of Twitter’s growth has occurred in the last two months it would be premature to say anything about whether it is sustainable or not.
Farmer says there is one big flaw in the Neilsen report:
- A lack of understanding of behavior of social network users. Twitter, like other social networks, has over 20 percent that sign up and never tweet. To treat these users of Twitter isn't accurate. If these non-users were eliminated, the retention rate jumps to 50 percent.
Farmer also said It’s clear that Twitter is on to something big. Most of Twitter’s user base has joined within the last three months, and 25 percent joined in April alone. This disparity is only going to increase as Twitter becomes a site filled with new users.
Is this growth, coming in at 17 million users last month according to comScore, actually unsustainable, as the Nielsen report concludes? It’s too early to tell, but the first-month drop-off is not a sign that Twitter is doing something wrong.
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