by Felix Richter, Statista.com
Does Twitter have a quitter problem? Ahead of its IPO, scheduled for November, the company finds itself confronted with research that suggests its platform isn’t sticky enough.
When Twitter unveiled its user numbers in its S1 filing a couple of weeks ago, many experts weren’t too impressed with the company’s user growth. Between June and September 2013, the company’s active user base grew no more than 6.1 percent to a total of 232 million. When Facebook’s quarter-over-quarter user growth first dropped to single-digits in Q2 2011, the social network’s user base had long exceeded half a billion people, indicating that Twitter’s potential reach is far smaller than that of its big cousin Facebook.
Another problem Twitter is apparently facing, is the fact that many people are interested in Twitter, join the service only to find out that they don’t know what to do with it. According to a recent poll conducted by Reuters and Ipsos, 36 percent of 1,067 people who joined Twitter weren’t using it anymore. Moreover, 7 percent of the respondents had even deleted their account altogether. Of the 2,449 Facebook users surveyed in the same study, only 7 percent were inactive and another 5 percent had deleted their account.
Given these numbers, it’s hard not to argue that Twitter, while tremendously popular among the tech-savvy crowd, lacks the universal appeal that Facebook has. And while it may be hard to imagine your grandma tweeting away, don’t be surprised to find her on Facebook anytime soon.
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