Nielsen posts about the “quitter” phenomenon:
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.
I would guess most of the “quitters” don’t understand how to use Twitter or where the value is (this is an ironic statement given my former criticism of Twitter).
What do you think about this Nielsen data and its implications for Twitter?
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Update: These data apparently don’t account for third party Twitter apps like Tweetie or TweetDeck. There’s some reason to believe accordingly that these data are incomplete or inaccurate accordingly.
Screenwerk 
April 29, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Totally agree with the lack of understanding theory.
There’s also the possibility that a number of people and businesses are simply claiming their account name & that they will figure out how to use it later. I certainly advise all of my clients to do that, even if they don’t post more than once or twice.
I’d be interested to know what Facebook’s abandonment rate is as a comparison. I know that my own personal pageviews on FB are down probably 95% since I really got engaged in Twitter last summer.
April 29, 2009 at 4:14 pm
David:
Would be an interesting comparison. Twitter and FB are definitely in “conflict” in my mind
April 29, 2009 at 6:12 pm
They simply are going off visits to Twitter. It is a well known fact that most Twitter activity doesn’t happen on Twitter at all. So if they sign up and use Twitterific, iPhone Apps, etc. from then on they count that as someone quitting on these stats.
April 29, 2009 at 6:14 pm
Steve, where did you see in the article they were just using Twitter.com as their metric point…?
If so it could be the reverse, i.e. Twitter users get savvier and use apps rather than Twitter.com, increasing their engagement with the platform and the community.
April 29, 2009 at 11:14 pm
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April 30, 2009 at 9:43 pm
Here, they state it at the bottom:
http://www.businessinsider.com/60-of-twitter-users-quit-after-a-month-2009-4
April 30, 2009 at 10:01 pm
Yep. Thanks Steve
May 3, 2009 at 4:27 am
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September 28, 2010 at 11:53 am
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