A theory about Twitter

A well-publicized Nielsen study found that Twitter's retention is only 40% -- fully 60% of the people who sign up for Twitter don't return after the first month.  Facebook, on the other hand, has a much higher retention rate.

There are a number of possible explanations for Twitter's relatively low retention rate -- unlike Facebook where you can play lots of games, etc., there's not much to do on Twitter except Tweet.  However, I believe that something else may be at play here.  On Facebook, you can add friends and there is a certain status for some people in having more friends than others -- if you have 800 friends and your peers have 150, maybe that means you're cooler, more popular or more of a Facebook veteran than they are.

On Twitter, you can also add friends by following people.  However, there's another dimension -- the number of people following you.  What that means is that everyone on Twitter has an implied Followers-to-Following (F:F) ratio, the ratio of people following you to the number of people you're following.  People like Oprah and Ashton Kutcher have enormous F:F ratios -- 64,799:1 and 11,083:1, respectively, as of this writing.  There is a certain status in having such a high ratio -- maybe it means that you're popular or somehow more interesting than others.

But what if you have a low F:F ratio and you're following more people than are following you?  Do the people who find status in the number of friends they have on Facebook also feel some sort of embarrassment when they're following lots more people than are following them on Twitter?

I have no idea if this is the case, but it would be interesting to look into the internals of the Nielsen research to see if there is some correlation between the likelihood of staying active in Twitter and the F:F ratio.  Are people with low F:F ratios less likely to stick with Twitter than those with high ratios?

Your thoughts?