As I have written about many times this year, twitter is the incredible hot at the moment. Everyone from your local coffee shop to Oprah is on Twitter and Twitter’s growth is skyrocketing.
eMarketer estimates there will be over 12 million Twitter users in the US in 2009, slightly more than twice last year’s number.
But figures released by Nielsen Online suggest that Twitter’s retention rate is only 40%. In other words, as David Martin wrote on the Nielsen blog:
“Currently, more than 60 percent of U.S. 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.”
With any new technology you have to expect that people will sign up to find out what all the buzz is about and then get bored after a period of time and stop using the service.
What is interesting is that it is not the 18-to-24-year-olds, the traditional social media early adopters, that are driving Twitter growth—25-to-54-year-olds are.
Specifically, 45-to-54-year-olds were 36% more likely than average to visit Twitter, making them the highest-indexing age group, and 25-to-34-year-olds were 30% more likely to visit.
“The skew towards older visitors, although perhaps initially surprising for a social media site, actually makes more sense than you might think at first,” wrote Sarah Radwanick on a comScore blog. “With so many businesses using Twitter, along with the first generations of Internet users ‘growing up’ and comfortable with technology, this is a sign that the traditional early adopter model might need to be revisited.”
Several assumptions might need to be revisited. There is no question, Twitter is not developing in the same way as its social networking predecessors, such as MySpace and Facebook. The question is: Will the Twitter fad fade, or is a powerfully simple networking tool only now beginning to find its unique audience? Only time will tell…
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When Oprah was talking with Ev, she said there were 14 million Twitter users but I’ve also heard 9 million & 10 million (US vs. International?). I wish Twitter would just release some basic demographic info.
“45-to-54-year-olds were 36% more likely than average to visit Twitter”
Could it be because of the simple interface?
Fad vs. trend – the old question.
In the case of Twitter, however, signs are meanwhile obvious that it is not just appreciated by the 45-to-54-year-olds, but driven. Twitter is also becoming quickly one of the preferred social media marketing channels for a lot of small businesses.
Wrote about Twitter’s demos a little while ago, drawing some conclusions of my own. Feel free to check it out. http://digg.com/u1ovc
Thanks for these stats. Has there been any stats on international users of Twitter that you could reference?
Keep up the great work!
I have not seen any Marty, but I will do some digging
David
It’s not surprising to me that Twitter is being driven by the “older” crowd. A simplistic explanation IMO is that it’s all over the traditional news media now with EVERYONE referring to it in their attempt to gather followers – thus growing their exposure in the marketplace. Again… simplistic explanation.
I think it’s past the fad phase into the trend phase and will probably see huge growth in the next 12-24 months. The real question for retention is how clearly the user sees the potential benefit to him/her.
What can twitter do for you?
twitter is simple and easy to use.. everyone like it,
There is no possible way that the data stated by eMarketer is correct. Upon signup, no Twitter user is required to enter their birthdate.
There are many ways that Twitter demographic data can be collected. Examples are MSN, Yahoo or Google account data or data from your ISP
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