Twitter’s appalling retention rate

From Rough Type

But a whirl does not a relationship make. According to a study out today from Nielsen, most people who sign up for a Twitter account bail within a few weeks:

Currently, more than 60 percent of Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent. For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention.

Even Oprah, it seems, may already be losing interest. Of the 20 tweets she’s issued since joining Twitter 11 days ago, half came on her first day on the service. She’s made nary a tweet in the last four days.

The half-life of a microblog, it turns out, is even briefer than the half-life of a blog.

When MySpace and Facebook were at the stage that Twitter is at today, their retention rates were, according to Nielsen, twice as high – and they’ve now stabilized at nearly 70 percent. Twitter’s high rate of churn will, if it continues, hamstring the service’s growth, says Nielsen’s David Martin: “A retention rate of 40 percent will limit a site’s growth to about a 10 percent reach figure … There simply aren’t enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point. [Twitter] will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty.”