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Showing their resilience against the ‘flavour of the month’ label, both Facebook and MySpace have since proven their staying power in the online community arena, but current media darling Twitter may yet fail to attain that same level of longevity, according to research outfit Nielsen.
Tweet, tweet!? No, thanks, I\'m Facebooking. Image: Twitter.
Specifically, David Martin, Nielson Online’s vice president of Primary Research, has offered that, while Twitter is presently enjoying the limelight and traffic afforded it by focused celebrity exposure from the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Jon Stewart and Ashton Kutcher, the micro-blogging site is failing to retain user interest.
“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,” outlined Martin on Nielsen Wire.
“For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention,” he added.
With Nielson noting that if current retention rates don’t dramatically increase, eventually new Twitter users will not be able to plug the gaps left by those failing to return, the research specialist also compared Twitter’s growth and appeal to social networking titans Facebook and MySpace.
In studying the retention rates posted by Facebook and MySpace at the same stage of their emergent growth, Nielsen found that both networks had amassed traffic retention figures beyond 80 percent, which have since fallen off but remain close to 70 percent.
“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,” warned Martin. “Frankly, if Oprah can’t accomplish that, I’m not sure who can.” Establishing that increased loyalty may mean Twitter branching out in terms of service and becoming more of a defined social network. At present, its appeal as an online instant messaging service is strictly singular while the likes of Facebook and MySpace offer a wealth of services, applications and distractions to maintain user interest.
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