Amongst all the stats showing Twitter’s amazing growth, comes another one showing something different - the fact that 60% of “newbies” are gone after the first month.
This Media Week article cites Nielsen figures as the source of the 60% churn rate (thanks to Katie Moffat for alerting me to it - also see update below).
Media Week says that this demonstrates an ““I don’t get it factor” among new users that is reminiscent of the similarly-over hyped Second Life from a few years ago.”
Just like Second Life?
Actually not quite, and here are three reasons why this parallel, which I’ve been hearing more and more lately, doesn’t apply.
1 - First of all, Second Life’s drop-off rate was much worse- not far off a whopping 90%, meaning that 20 million sign ups currently translates into 750k human beings in the virtual world (via their avatars), once you account for dormant and duplicate accounts.
2 - Secondly, the entry barriers for Twitter are far lower. Unlike Second Life you don’t need a super fast computer. You can enjoy it with most mobile phones on sale these days. That also means it’s much easier just to come and go.
3 - With Twitter the numbers aren’t the whole story.
Active Twitter users are heavily skewed towards media and tech types - people who can make things happen out of proportion to their numbers. Amazon is only one of many companies that found this out first hand.
And the service has arguably outflanked mainstream news services when it’s come to reporting real time events.
Still, as Nielsen VP David Martin says, even though it’s early days:
“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. Frankly, if Oprah can’t accomplish that, I’m not sure who can.”
Update - this piece by Ian Paul on PC Pro is worth reading. Ian questions the methodology on this and wonders if Nielsen measured Twitter website visits.
If so, then Nielsen’s figures would be inaccurate, as a lot of Twitter users access the service via third party applications such as Tweet Deck.
However, could it be that these stats have got so much pick-up because it’s what some people want to hear. “See…told you, it’s all a bunch of hype, no normal people use it, waste of time, let’s move on”….and in that sense there are actually echoes of Second Life.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Frustrating that Oprah is considered the tell-tale account. Perhaps Oprah hasn’t found the necessary loyalty because she’s not sharing compelling content?? I’ve found O Magazine is a much more interesting follow.
Thanks Claire for the comment and I agree.
Wait for a month or so and we’ll have ‘Oprah hasn’t hit a million followers, she’s bored of it’ or whatever and the whole thing will be pronounced a huge failure.
I’m not pretending that the Twitter model hasn’t got flaws, but I would have thought Nielsen with its social media history would have known better than to play a straight numbers game.
Or maybe they just realised it would get picked up far and wide as it’s what a lot of people had been waiting for
I wonder how many cases in that 60% drop off were like mine? I signed up, abandoned it for a few months until I was followed by a couple people I knew, and now use it every day. Am I one of the people in that 60% ???
Also, another big difference-
Twitter=lots of somewhat professional grownups who are obsessed with social media
SL=lots of sexually deviant furries who are kind of weird
Hi Carl, thanks for the comments. I agree, Twitter makes it very easy to come and go and you could also close one ID down and open another one no problem.
I also saw one reaction to the Nielsen stats which said that a lot of the ‘churn’ is also due to the thousands of spammer accounts that open and close with regularity.
On Second Life, I’d dispute that this is so in fact, but it is certainly the case in perception - and that perception has proven to be a big problem for the world’s owners.
I’d dispute Carls characterization of SL users as “furries”, and their being “wierd” has *nothing* on the grand panoply of non-furry wierdness in the world.
However, SL *does* have a huge contingent of folks who are not satisfied with how they appear in RL. And that translates into “sexy” avatars, if not a lot of 3D Cybersex.