Twitter users do not come home to roost

A blog post from Nielsen Online has shown that 60 per cent of Twitter users do not return the month after they join the site.

The post by David Martin, vice president of Primary Research at Nielsen Online, said: "People are signing up in droves, and " Twitter's unique audience is up over 100 per cent in March. But despite the hockey-stick growth chart, Twitter faces an uphill battle in making sure these flocks of new users are enticed to return to the nest."

He claimed that Twitter's user retention rate has fallen below 30 per cent, although celebrity members, such as recent Twitter recruit Oprah Winfrey, boost numbers.

Martin said: "To be clear, a high retention rate doesn't guarantee a massive audience, but it is a prerequisite. There simply aren't enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point."

He does acknowledge that Twitter is still in its early days but when comparing it to other social networking giants, both Facebook and MySpace had double the retention rates and these just continued to rise alongside their popularity.

Martin concluded: "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."

Twitter had not returned our request for comment at the time of publication.