"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. 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 per cent". David Martin From Neilsen Online.
This may be related to the massive hype around twitter, and the rush of customers who are joining twitter without really understanding what it is all about or the benefits of using this service.
For those that don't know what Twitter is - its a free micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users' updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length which are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them (known as followers). For those users who are on Facebook - a good analogy would be updating your "status".
From a (business) perspective here are some good examples of using twitter
- Get Feedback on your products, services or marketing campaign
- Hire staff
- Drive traffic to your website
- Customer Notifications (telstra uses twitter for this)
- Event Updates
- Read news ("tweets" often contain links to other interesting material)
- Make friends and influence people
- Network with other like minded people.
