Web 2.0 Featured Article

Twitter Use Accelerates, Abandonment Remains High

By Gary Kim, Contributing Editor

Twitter growth has accelerated this year, but very-high percentages of new users seem to stop using after a month. According to Sysomos, 72.5 percent of all Twitter users joined the service in the first five months of this year. Compared to 2008, the 2009 growth rate is about 200 percent.

 

Some 18 million U.S. adults will be using Twitter at least monthly by the end of 2009, climbing to 26 million in 2010, says eMarketer (News - Alert). This year, that implies penetration or use by about 11 percent of Internet users. But Twitter continues to have a very-high abandonment rate, and eMarketer says Twitter user engagement is “low.”

 

Nielsen researchers recently studied churn rates for Twitter.com and more than 30 Web sites and applications that feed into the Twitter community including: TweetDeck, TwitPic, Twitstat, Hootsuite, EasyTweets and Tumblr. That study verified Nielsen’s original estimate of very high abandonment rates.

 

About 60 percent of people on Twitter end up abandoning the service after a month. The year-long retention curve looks very much the same as the one for just Twitter.com. Namely, retention of new users appears to range between 30 and 35 percent in any single month. Extrapolated across the entire Twitter user base, that implies a turnover of virtually the entire user base every year and a half.

 

That might not be a problem for an application early in its life cycle, and user behavior might well change over time. Still, it will be hard for Twitter to reach the status of a widely-used application if it continues to experience such high churn. At some point, it would run out of new people to try the application.

 

“There are indications that large numbers of users are abandoning Twitter after a short period of experimentation, and another sizable contingent seems to use the service only sporadically, eMarketer says.

 

As tends to be the case for more traditional blogging, most people read, but don’t write.

 

Some 85 percent of Twitter users tweet less than once per day. Only about 1.1 percent of users update their timeline an average of more than 10 times daily. This means 75 percent of all Twitter activity comes from just five percent of users.

 

Originally, eMarketer had suggested Twitter usage would climb to about 12 million in 2009. The revised forecast up to 18 million seems largely driven by a new methodology for counting Twitter use that includes access by text message, desktop applications and mobile updating, in addition to use of the Twitter.com site itself.

 

The new users also are creating a user base that is younger, where initially, many Twitter users were older. Now, more than one-half of all Twitter users – or 53 percent – are women, and the majority is young. Among users who disclose their age, 66 percent are under 25, and another 15 percent are ages 25 to 29.

 

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Gary Kim (News - Alert) is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Gary’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Erin Harrison