Can Twitter survive?

Jake Widman
Friday, 01 May 2009 00:43

Business IT - Technology

According to Nielsen Online, most Twitter users don't come back the next month, raising questions about the service's long-term prospects.

Twitter has certainly not lacked for media buzz, with Oprah Winfrey among others recently jumping on the tweeting bandwagon.

The social media service has also seen increasing acceptance in the enterprise world, as Salesforce.com and other companies have begun to use it to keep in touch with their customers.

But acceptance at the top won't help the service if it doesn't survive rejection at the bottom.

A study by Nielsen Online has found that only about 40 percent of U.S. Twitter users in a given month return the next month.

Projections indicate that such a poor retention rate would limit Twitter's reach to 10 percent of the Internet audience. "There simply aren’t enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point," said Nielsen Vice President, Primary Research David Martin in a blog post .

By comparison, retention rates for Facebook and MySpace were twice as high at similar points in their development.

Twitter fans questioned the results, pointing out that Nielsen only measured use of the Twitter Web site and did not count tweeters using phones and other clients.

But a followup post from Martin says that in response to the criticism, Nielsen updated the study and included 30 non-Twitter.com clients.

The result: "The year-long retention curve looks very much the same as the one for just Twitter.com."

P.S. You can follow Nielsen's news releases on Twitter .