Healthcare communications and marketing news and information

 According to data released by eMarketer recently, 12 million Americans will be using Twitter by the end of 2009.  This certainly points to Twitter’s popularity.  However, will all of these new Twitter users stick around?

Perhaps not.  Nielsen Online estimates that nearly 60% of people who try Twitter don’t return the following month.  This is clearly sobering news.  With Twitter’s user base evolving so rapidly, it’s more important than ever to understand whether or not your target audience:

-Is utilizing Twitter
-Are transient or dedicated users
-Is using Twitter for informational, personal, or business purposes

(After significant critisism from Twitter users, Nielsen updated its study and got the same results when accounting for the various software packages and platforms that feature Twitter, including TweetDeck and Hootsuite.)

It’s important to remember that new technologies tend to undergo huge shifts in use until they stabilize.  After all, in the early days of blogging there was a good amount of research suggesting that many bloggers quickly abandon their Weblogs.  Today, blogging has peaked, but many, many people are still actively managing their sites.  

Overall, the Nielsen data underscores why understanding the media consumption habits of your target audiences before launching a campaign using a specific media channel is so important.