A week ago, I twittered about the “Twitter Quitters,” people who signed up for Twitter and left within a month.  It’s an interesting study, but here’s a follow up from VentureBeat that says that their study is probably wrong for a variety of reasons:
Their report states that 40 percent of users fail to return to Twitter in the month immediately after they join. It says nothing about the second, third, or fourth months after they join.
For example, if I join Twitter in January but don’t tweet until March I would be considered a “Twitter quitter†in Nielsen’s report. This behavior is common on immature social networks where new users who join don’t yet have any friends or followers.
It also turns out that a large portion — over 20 percent — of the people who fail to return the next month never once updated their status. It seems unfair to penalize Twitter for users who sign up and never tweet. After all, one could just as easily pretend they never signed up and the retention rate would increase by 50 percent in April alone, from 40 percent to 60 percent.
These are good points and I would agree with them. In fact, I signed up for Twitter, and then didn’t use it for some time. I think there’re are plenty of people who sign up because there’s so much buzz about it but don’t know what to do with it… I know i have a bunch of followers and followees that haven’t twittered yet, but I’m not counting them out. Eventually, they’ll have something good to say – at least I hope so, as some of them have lots to say and good products to tell the world about.
Tomorrow I’m going to talk to a couple of them to tell them how they can use Twitter better…
I’m always looking for how people are truly making money by using Twitter, not just by spamming their followers with network marketing schemes, but by truly getting sign ups, or selling a product or service. I don’t believe the perfect model has been found yet. I have a few ideas, but maybe I’ll save them for a paying client…
