Recent studies by Nielsen Online have shown that many users who join twitter are not coming back. Even though Twitter had over 13.9 Million new users in March of 2009 stats show that over 60% of them are not returning. Now keep in mind that these are not users “leaving” twitter. These are just users joining, following one or two users, posting a tweet or two, and then never going back.
This is an astonishing number of users not staying. I know that many of these users are moms and kids signing up to follow Opera or some other star who soon forget about the site. I also believe that there are a lot of users who sign up and its not what they expected. Twitter is a concept that is hard to explain to those who are not tech savvy. Your every day person hears that there is a new popular social network and they are expecting a Facebook or Myspace. To us web 2.0 users we know that twitter is way more powerful than Facebook or Myspace, but to others its a useless messaging client that is hard to understand.