Loyalty Problems: Twitter Glitter Wears Off Quickly

Twitter is perhaps the glitziest of the popular social media networks, attracting celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Ashton Kutcher and Britney Spears. But once the glitter wears off, many Twitter users find there's not much worth sticking around for.

What Twitter lacks, according to new research, is user loyalty. Twitter is struggling with audience retention, as more than 60 percent of Twitter users fail to return to the service the following month, according to Nielsen Online, which measures Internet usage. That translates to an audience retention rate of 40 percent, which is low enough to limit the scope of Twitter's Internet reach, said David Martin, vice president of primary research for Nielsen Online.

"Pre-Oprah," Twitter's audience retention rate fell below 30 percent, he said.

"People are signing up in droves, and Twitter's unique audience is up over 100 percent in March," Martin said in a blog post. "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."

Twitter made tremendous leaps in notoriety in recent months as Kutcher publicly challenged CNN to a race to see which could be the first to gather 1 million Twitter followers. Kutcher won the duel, hitting the milestone on April 17.

That was the same day Winfrey sent her first "tweet," the name commonly given to the 140-character messages Twitter users send out (A little over a week later, she's already closing in on 700,000 followers).

The convergence of star power around Twitter gave the microblogging service more than its fair share of news coverage and helped bolster its popularity. But if those users don't stay in it for the long haul, Twitter won't ever have widespread Internet reach, Martin said.

"To be clear, a high retention rate doesn't guarantee a massive audience, but it is a prerequisite. There simply aren't enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point," he said.