It seems like all the buzz this week is surrounding either Swine Flu or Twitter and its amazing growth. Well since the media has covered Swine Flu over-zealously (at times) this week, I’ll talk more about Twitter. So what’s the big deal? Well, for those of you who haven’t been living under a rock, Twitter is a social networking tool that is exploding with growth right now. It has gotten a lot of publicity lately because of all the celebrities using it, but it’s also a great way for business owners to reach their consumers on a 140 character level. 

As great as Twitter is though (and I’m a recent convert, so I can’t speak harshly about it), it seems that they’re having a bit of trouble with their user retention. A recent article on MarketingVox showed that more than 60% of US Twitter users fail to return the following month, according to the BusinessInsider. It’s not like social networks like Facebook or MySpace can be accredited with anything near 100% user retention, but still they measure up at a descent 60%. Even Oprah was called out on not having “tweeted” for 4 days after she had publicly joined.

So this begs the question — What does Twitter have to do to keep its users? Well anyone who has used Facebook or MySpace knows that in addition to the status updates that can be posted there–there are a plethora of  other applications, games, quizzes, 25 random things to list about yourself, photos to be posted. Twitter does have a lot of different applications associated with it, but for new users these may be hard to find. Also, Twitter is still young. And with significant growth comes exposure so hopefully users will start to trickle back in as it becomes more mainstream.

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