60% of Twitter Users Abandon Fail Whale After Only A Month?

According to a post on the Nielson blog (which I found through Mashable) over 60% of Twitter users quit the service after only one month. All of the staggering growth aside, it seems as though Twitter may have a hard time riding out this momentum long-term.

From the Nielson blog:

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. For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention.

image from Nielson

A 40% retention rate is not that great, especially compared to Facebook and MySpace, who years later still hover around 70%. Having people drop off the service that fast will not be good for growth or the future of Twitter.

Personally, I know a lot of people who signed up for the service, thought it was dumb and left. Part of that comes from the service being caught in the media hype-train. Part of it comes from the stigma of Twitter being the service to tell people what you just ate for lunch. Part of that comes from people who try it out and find out it's not for them.

I've become quite the Twitter fan, but having used the service for a couple of months now, I don't see it offering enough to ever catch up to something like Facebook or Myspace. Does it need to? Probably not. Right now, it's estimated to only have about 6 million users, which is still low, especially considering all the hype it's been getting. Do you think Twitter is going to make it through or is the high dropout rate proof that Twitter is the next social media fad?

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Your Space or MySpace?

image from product-reviews.net

I can't imagine Tom being terribly happy at the moment. With Facebook surging and MySpace falling behind, the former king of social networking and the entire web 2.0 movement is in dire need of a shakeup. When I saw that article a few days ago, I attempted to brainstorm some potential solutions to improve MySpace's position with no real luck.

According to an article I found on Tech Crunch, News Corp. has found the guy to turn the ship around. Johnathan Miller has been named the CEO of Digital Media for News Corp., which includes MySpace.

image from Tech Crunch

Does he have what it takes? It's too early to pass judgement, but according to Tech Crunch, he lacks the most obvious tool one would need in order to sell MySpace: a MySpace profile.

One of the fundamentals of being able to sell a product is to know the product. Not just read about it or have people explain it to you. Use it.

Back in second semester of my Creative Advertising program, my group and I had to do an assignment dissecting a television ad for Stride gum. While it would have been easy for us to say, "Oh, it's gum. We know what that's like," we bought packs of Stride gum and all of its competition to help us get a feel of what's happening in the marketplace.

By actually purchasing the gum, we were able to gather insights we didn't initially see, such as the move away from blister packs into a more trendy paper package. And by searching Facebook, we saw that there was a contingent of Stride users that chewed the gum with the wrapper. As odd and awful as it sounds, you better believe we chewed the wrapper too to get the full picture.

While I can see why he would have no personal use for a page on a social network with a reputation of catering to high school students, creepers and emo bands, not having a profile doesn't bode well for consumer confidence. I'm not saying he needs to add 10,000 "friends" and have music from Fall Out Boy playing in the background on his page, but any sort of proof that he understands the product he's in charge of selling could go a long way.

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