Twitter Quitters: The Need to Connect More

Neilsen research has recently studied Twitter and concluded that 60% of its users do not return the next month. Basically only 40% return each month.

Does this present a roadblock to twitter?”  Perhaps, as MySpace and Facebook have more users now and had double the retention rate during their formative years.

I would expect Twitter to combat this by coming up with incentives to return. One possible idea is getting users connected more and connecting easily.

If people do not connect with others, then they probably fall off the network.If you have no followers, then why post?”  If you don’t follow others, then why return?”  Does a tweet all alone in the woods, go unheard.

In Facebook, its easy to connect with old friends and see what they are doing. It’s basically voyeuristic to lookup old high school friends and college friends and see how they are doing now. You make instant connections and get instant feedback. You can also twitter away there too.

To make connections on twitter, you are kind of stuck with four options:

1. Search for a username, first or last name – Again only if you know the people.
2. Find people through other networks – Find people via your email.
3. Invite by Email – Basically a tool to invite people you know.
4. Suggested users – Basically who Twitter thinks I might like.
5. Find them through another off-site method and manually connect.

It seems that in order to retain people, they need a better community. Perhaps getting a suggested users tool, similar to Facebook. “  Perhaps a tool that allows me to search for related users with similar backgrounds or interests (not just by name/email/invite/or the approved list of twitter).

How about some drill down tool that allows me to quickly find other web designers, marketers or anything on the topics I want to read?”  This would allow me to quickly add people that I might find interesting. Prompting me to return and then offer our ideas too.

Who knows, maybe this is out there already. I do know of several micro sites setup just for specific followings, but none directly tied into twitter itself on their actual web site.

In any event, this would change twitter into just being micro-blogging, into a larger community. Perhaps that is what they need to grow, but perhaps that would ruin the simplicity of twitter.