Twitters attrition rate dogs IPO

Hovasses experience highlights a risk for investors as Twitter Inc marches towards this years most anticipated initial public offering in the US,expected to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange in mid-November.

According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll,36 per cent of 1,067 people who have joined Twitter say they do not use it,and 7 per cent say they have shut their account. The online survey,conducted October 11 to 18,has a credibility interval,a measure of its accuracy,of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points. In comparison,only 7 per cent of 2,449 Facebook members report not using the online social network,and 5 per cent say they have shut down their account. The results have a credibility interval of 2.3 per cent.

Twitter declined to comment for this story,saying it is in a quiet period ahead of its IPO.

Twitters attrition rate highlights a challenge that has dogged the online messaging site over the years: while it has managed to enlist many high-profile and avid users,from the Pope to President Barack Obama,Twitter has yet to go truly mainstream in the way Facebook has.

Twitter reported it had 232 million active users people who access the service at least once a month at the end of September,up 6.1 per cent from June-end. Twitters quarter-over-quarter growth in active users has not exceeded 11 per cent since June 2012.

When Facebook was a similar size,its active users were increasing by more than 20 per cent every quarter,and it was not until the social network neared the half-a-billion member mark that its user growth decelerated to 12 per cent.