inothernews:

Isn’t Nielsen too busy taking educated guesses at just how many people are watching TV to waste time on measuring how long people stay on fucking Twitter?

pearlsbeforeswine:soupsoup:brooklynmutt:

Media folk are tripping over each other these days to tell their audiences how cool they think Twitter is and how deeply they are into Twitter culture.

Maybe so. But here’s a fascinating fact from a new Nielsen survey: Three out of every five users who sign up for Twitter drop out by the second month. That is only a 40 percent retention rate — much lower than that for Facebook and MySpace.

It makes you wonder how satisfying users are really finding Twitter. Or, maybe the question is: How short are the attention spans of some of these users?

Here’s a link to the Nielsen study along with a nice graphic of the steep decline in second-month use:

fullnelson

Nielsen Wire

Are we really expecting long attention spans from 140-character-max tweets?

Plus, there isn’t an idiot-proof guide to what people/promotions/companies people would actually get some value following, so I imagine they quickly grow bored reading about what their coworker ate for lunch.