Twindling Users At Twitter?

Nielsen reports that Twitter users drop out in high numbers:

[from Twitter users not sticking around: Nielsen by AFP: Yahoo! Tech]

More than 60 percent of Twitter users have stopped using the micro-blogging service a month after joining, according to Nielsen Online research released on Tuesday.

“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,” said David Martin, Nielsen Online’s vice president for primary research.

Martin, in a post on the company blog, said that more than 60 percent of Twitter users fail to return the following month.

“Or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent,” he said.

“Let there be no doubt: Twitter has grown exponentially in the past few months with no small thanks to celebrity exposure,” he said in a reference to new users such as US talk show host Oprah Winfrey and promoters such as actor Ashton Kutcher.

“People are signing up in droves, and Twitter’s unique audience is up over 100 percent in March,” Martin said.

“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 said.

“A retention rate of 40 percent will limit a site’s growth to about a 10 percent reach figure,” he said in a reference to the number of potential users.

Hmmm. What’s missing that would make more stick?

I wonder if the great majority drop out before ever switching to a desktop client application? The UI for Twitter is ghastly (and clients are only slightly better, really).

Twitter needs a rethink of user experience (keep the old one around as Classic Twitter, for the hard core dweebs) that matches the bang of the underlying model, and that will retain social scale as the overall community of users becomes 100M or more.