Is Twitter’s growth stalling?
eMarketer has suggested that Twitter’s growth could nearly double to 20 million users in 2010. But Nielsen thinks otherwise.
Nielsen has been looking at Twitter’s retention rates. Everyone knows someone who has signed up, tweeted a couple of times and then become fed up of waiting for followers, action, something! So I don’t think it’s surprising that Neilsen found only 40% of new users stuck around. This would keep Twitter’s growth to 10% – hardly explosive.
Nielsen has compared Twitter to Facebook and MySpace when they were starting out – their retention rates were twice as high. When they went through their explosive growth phases, retention went up. Both sit at nearly 70 percent today.
Hmmm – I guess we just have to see what happens! Twitter has been called a one-trick pony compared to FB and MySpace. So I guess it’s up to Twitter owners – and passionate tweeters – to prove this fab micro-blogging tool is anything but.
Thanks to Mark Evans from www.twitterrati.com for the stats, graphs and info used in this post.
