We Are Organized Chaos

Twitter’s Retention Rate Is 40%

Finally! Nielsen has given us some retention rates for Twitter. I mean, Twitter’s growth has been incredibly impressive, but the real question in my mind has always been: how many of those visitors are really using the service.  Twitter’s gotten more press than Obama and the Pope combined the past few months.  It should have gotten a crazy amount of visitors, but are they sticking around?

In short, no.  According to Nielsen “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.”

So, is this Second Life 2.0, as so many critics would like it to be?  I don’t think so, but clearly, we’re not looking at Facebook 2.0 either.  Don’t get me wrong, Twitter doesn’t need to continue it’s meteoric growth to be a sizable community and create value for (some) brands/businesses.  It doesn’t need to be the biggest site ever to have value. But, can it increase it’s retention rates and subsequently grow into a real and sustainable social networking powerhouse?  Can it make it to the next level? If I worked at Twitter, improving those retention rates (and a revenue stream) would be my focus.

If Twitter is to increase that retention rate they need to take control of their site, and the consumer experience.  The early adopters are there, they get it, they love it.  Now, this is very tricky territory. Twitter can’t butcher the experience for their most loyal users (or they will revolt, and potentially leave), but clearly, a majority of visitors are not willing to take the time to figure out where the value is in this service.  Flat out, if it is going to see long term growth (if that’s even one of their business objectives), Twitter needs to become more consumer friendly.  Here are a few items that I think they can immediately start working on:

• Do a better job of educating the average consumer on the “why’s” and the “how’s” of Twitter.  Currently, too much responsibility for figuring out why and how one should use Twitter is placed on the consumer.  They are being misinformed (I mean, the Twitter home page still claims that the whole experience is about frequent answers to the question: “what are you doing?”) and asked to do too much work.  Twitter knows when someone is new to the site, help them out, hold their hand and offer suggestions.
• Create more intuitive tools to help people find people.  Twitter is a community site.  Help people create their communities.  Create tools that will make it easier for people to connect and find value.  As Facebook is showing us, once people begin to find that value, they’ll stick around.  It doesn’t matter if individuals are on Twitter to find offline friends, to network, or to follow Oprah, the site should constantly be helping them to find value and create meaningful experiences/connections.  Right now, those tools are inadequate, cumbersome, and relatively hidden.
• Create clear, concise, and consumer friendly messaging, and once that’s done, stick to it and make sure your spokespeople are always on message.   Right now Twitter’s messaging is all over the place, and has subsequently created confusion in the marketplace.  To be honest, it’s a larger issue than I’m really willing to tackle right now, as Twitter needs to take control of their brand.  Someone needs to get behind the wheel and start steering the ship.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts (@jack2point0).

Tags: Facebook, Nielsen, Obama, Pope, Retention Rate, Second Life, Twitter