Twitter has grown exponentially in the past few months and boasts of a user base of 190 million. Celebs are scrambling to climb onto the Twitter bandwagon, people are joining in droves. Now days it has become essential to have a twitter profile. Audience is increasing at faster speeds than ever before. But despite such promising growth, Twitter faces a daunting task of making sure that the new users are brought back, again and again.
So what’s the problem?
For quite some time, about 60 percent of new users signing up for Twitter fail to return the following month, leading to an audience retention rate of around 40 percent only. According to researchers a high retention rate of around 60 percent may guarantee far better internet reach, that is, a wider audience. While a low retention rate which Twitter is showing right now may cripple its future prospects.
It’s too early to strike Twitter off, it is still a fledgling, and even other similar sites faced some problems in their earlier days. Behemoths of social networking like Facebook and MySpace also faced problems of retention. A point to note here is, when they were in this stage, their retention rates were twice as high. And after their budding stage, they managed to sustain a retention rate of about 70 percent.
A detailed study of Twitter and its associated services also revealed the same trend. About 60 percent of new users hang around for month and then disappear. But some Twitter fans do swear by the service and are loyal to it.
Twitter does indeed have a strong and vocal user base with some people having adopted it as a normal way to communicate and express themselves. Everyday people send 50 million tweets, by no means a small amount. To grow further and survive, undoubtedly it needs to achieve a higher level of user loyalty and retention.