Will everyone stop worrying about Twitter’s retention rates?!

by jeffhilimire on August 31, 2009

Fred Wilson wrote a great piece on the Twitter and Facebook retention rate stats.  Subscribe to his blog, follow his tweets and if you’re daring, check out his tumbles.  He’s the one guy on my list that I always try to read.

Below is my response to his post:

“No one goes to the ballparks anymore because they’re too crowded.” – Yogi Berra

Any service like Twitter or Facebook that gets HUGE publicity will have a tremendous amount of people signing up to see what the big deal is. I think we’d all agree that neither service (no service for that matter) is for everyone. But with these two juggernauts, everyone is going to try them. And of course, the people that never would have used it anyway but tried it because of Oprah, well they’ll quit.

This is not a sign that the Twitter guys have massive problems to address, its a sign that they are incredibly popular. If the press stopped talking about them for a week, BAM! they’d suddenly have a massive increase in retention.

What’s staggering about these two companies is the people that really use them, use the sh&t out of them. Like all the time, when they first fire up their laptop and when they finally close it down.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tagged as: facebook, quitter, retention rate, twitter

  • sherryheyl
    I am still not "convinced" twitter has staying power. I oftentimes look at examples I am closest to, myself, and I was bored with twitter after a year and a half (Feb 07 through middle of 08). However I have stuck around to see what is in it for my clients. I think there is still a huge percentage of scammers and spammers and the time barrier that twitter re-introduced to the Internet gives it a disadvantage to the status updates that happen on the other networking sites.

    I do believe there are places for Twitter, especially during events, breaking news, and chats with friends. I also believe like all other social media channels, there is a tremendous amount of BI that can be obtained from Twitter, but I am not convinced of Twitter's staying power.
  • To me what Twitter introduced more than anything else is the idea of the web in real time. And you basically are talking about that with breaking news and events. I'm not sure if Twitter is going to survive, but I think they've made the big boys (Facebook and Google) stand up and take notice of the power of real-time search.

    I still prefer Twitter to Facebook because you get so much less of the "I'm at the Varsity" updates than you do with Fbook. What I get from Twitter today, mainly information streams of content I'm interested and conversations with people in the industry that I respect, is something that I can't <today> get from anything else.

    So I agree, not sure if Twitter itself will survive in the long run, but I have a feeling they've started us down a path that we've only just started to explore.
  • karnacrawford
    I hear u @jeffhillimire. But don't u get the different content on Twitter versus FB based on the context with which you use it and the people u befriend? You get great biz content because uv chosen to leverage Twitter as a biz tool and u and friends talk about biz things. So, wut if Twitter partnered with linked in. Then ud have the biz social net power of LI with the message and search power of T.

    Also, I think more than web in real team (since I think email and SMS fulfilled that role before Twitter). I'd argue Twitter. Introduced a unique area of "social search" or "network search". All of a sudden every blog, social net, news feed and more are easily searchable with perameters and indexing that seems to exceed a typical engines ability to do it in a relevant way.

    Or perhaps I'd say Twitter created social interactions aroun broadcast messages. So, while in the past I might get real time news from friends or newsletters via SMS or email, it was mostly a one way dialogue and was stationary, existing only on the site where it originated. Now, I get the same thing but am able to not only respond/react, but I can discuss it with others...and I can port the discussion to other places and engage new people into it.
  • Good points across the board here. I considered the Linkedin angle actually but didn't put it because I then thought, what about the guy who loves cooking. Does he have to find a social network for cooks and then hope it has twitter-like capabilities? Or does the cook only need to "friend" other cooks on Facebook otherwise he'll get updates that aren't interesting to him?

    The power of Twitter to me is that it's NOT connected to a social network. It's a stand alone messaging system. Because of that, people make of it what they want.

    Re: search, I think you're right that it created real time social search, but I'd still argue it created real time search as a concept. Still today, if I post up this comment and then quickly search Google, it won't show up yet. The spiders haven't found it yet. For anything real time, the only way today is to find it on Twitter, but of course it has to be posted on Twitter, which limits the amount of content to a tiny bit.

    I think your last paragraph nails it.
blog comments powered by Disqus

Previous post:

Next post: