What Is the Retention Rate on Twitter?
Getting people to join your social media service is one thing; getting them to stick around is quite another. The retention rate measures the proportion of users who remain active on a site after joining it. Leaked reports have suggested Twitter's retention rate may be low, meaning its number of registered users isn't necessarily an indication of its success.
Other People Are Reading
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Figure
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Twitter doesn't publish the retention rate of its users, so figuring the rate out is a difficult and complex task. The most high-profile estimate came from Nielsen in 2009. Using the data it was able to obtain about actual visits to the Twitter website, it estimated the retention rate after one month was 40 percent. That means that of all the individual users who visited the Twitter site in one calendar month, only 40 percent returned the next month.
Comparison
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According to Nielsen, Twitter's retention rate at this stage and previous stages of its operating history were well below that of rival sites such as Facebook and MySpace. It concluded that at the respective stages of their lifespans those sites had achieved a retention rate of 60 percent. At the time of the Twitter study, those sites were both at around 70 percent.
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Limitations
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Some sources questioned the methodology Nielsen used. The study only looked at the Twitter.com website and didn't take into account people accessing Twitter through other means such as dedicated computer, tablet or smartphone applications. That could have distorted the figures, for example through people using the website to sign up to Twitter but quickly switching to an app to actually use the service. Nielsen responded to this criticism by looking at around 30 key sites and apps used for accessing Twitter and said the retention rate remained largely unchanged when taking into account these alternative methods.
Alternative Meaning
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In the business world, retention rate refers to the proportion of a company's profits that it keeps rather than distributing as dividends to shareholders. Financial analysts have estimated that Twitter was losing money at least until 2011, meaning it wouldn't have a retention rate, but that it may later have become profitable. As of February 2013 Twitter was a privately owned company that did not publish its financial details. Because of this privacy, its profit retention rate is not public knowledge.
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