A while back, we had a discussion going on this blog about Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants. I argued that I fell into a gray area between these artificial categories because I grew up with digital technology, but I was not immersed in it in the way that today's children are. Some of our readers felt the same way. Now a reader writes:
I hear what you say about the gray in between...but there is another gray area which I call the digital "tourists". They are the ones that don't immigrate, who create a Facebook account like they pass through a city or a town...once for a few days, connect with maybe 15 people that they already talk to every day, never to return but claiming they are well-traveled and yes, "I'm on Facebook/ Twitter/ LinkedIn." But this is probably because they hear it's the buzz and the thing that smart people talk about....so they opt in but never quite "get" it and never embrace and internalize the culture. That's the difference between immigrants and tourists.
User retention is a big concern for all social networking services. It was one of the biggest problems for Second Life, which at one point retained only 10% of new users after a brief trial. Now Twitter is facing the same problem. On Tuesday, Nielsen reported that Twitter's retention rate is about half that of Facebook and MySpace at the same point in their company lifespans:
Currently, more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month, 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 percent. For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention.
Of course, it might be harder to measure Twitter users because they can access the service from a number of third-party applications, rather than going to Twitter.com. This is a strategy that Facebook is now adopting, as well.
But I wonder: how many of these users that social networking sites fail to retain are in the older "Digital Tourist" demographic the reader describes?
-Jeff
Update: A study released today provides some data from Nielsen Mobile on the demographics of Twitter and Predicto, the largest paid mobile community:
Some key differences in the user breakdown of the two leading mobile communities include 57/43 percent male/female ratio for Twitter versus 45/55 percent for Predicto; 49 percent of Twitter users are in the 35+ age group versus 68 percent with Predicto; and 16 percent of Twitter users earn $100K+ versus 20 percent for Predicto.
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