60% of Twitter users 'quit after a month'

New research has come to light that more than 60 per cent of those who sign up to Twitter stop using the micro-blogging site after just one month.

According to Nielsen Online, the amount of people who come back to the site after a month's use is surprisingly low, prompting fears that Twitter's sudden surge in popularity will be a short-term thing.

All about retention

Nielsen Online's Vice President for Primary Research David Martin, wrote on the website: "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.

For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention… the percentage of a given month's users who come back the following month [at the moment] is currently about 40 percent."

Martin goes on to reveal that while a decent retention rate doesn't guarantee a site bigger audience figures, it "is a prerequisite".

Meteoric rise

The blog even has some nifty line graphs to show you just what the retention rates for other sites are like.

In none-too technical terms, MySpace's and Facebook's look fairly flat, while Twitter's currently resembles an outline of the Alps, with lots of peaks and troughs of where the site has gained and waned in loyalty.

Most pertinently Martin believes that, at its current rate of popularity, Twitter will "not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty."