Daily Dose of social media: Majority of new Twitter users don’t stick around

Swine Flu Hysteria: 10,000 Tweets Per Hour — Swine Flu has become the hottest topic on Twitter, sometimes peaking with more than 10,000 tweets per hour going out that mention the virus. Actually, to be more accurate, the top two trending topics on Twitter are swine flu related.

Twitter is a great way to track what’s going on in the world and what people are talking about. But, as you see from the graph below, it can be difficult to process so many tweets at once. That’s why the CDC having a Twitter account of its own makes so much sense: it’s the perfect way to cut through the noise.

This is just a graph that searches Twitter for “swine flu.” The hastag #swineflu has peaked at more than 1,500 tweets an hour.

Study: Twitter Audience Does Not Have A Return Policy — Perhaps it’s because many people don’t understand how Twitter works or perhaps it is because Twitter is sometimes over hyped, but about 60 percent of people who sign up for Twitter do not return next month.

To be fair, this 40 percent retention rate is higher than it used to be on Twitter. What you should take away from this data is that the majority of people either don’t understand Twitter that well or are unable to find value out of it.

Part of the problem is that too many people take Twitter’s question, “what are you doing?” too literally. Unless you’re famous or have a really engaging personality, most people don’t care what you’re eating, watching, about to do, etc — especially at first (this is known as lifecasting). Once you build some followers, they might care, but when you first start out, no one is going to follow you with those kind of tweets.

In addition, if those are the kinds of updates that you want to leave on Twitter, make sure your friends and family are on Twitter and are following you. Those people might actually care about your life details. For everyone else, mindcasting — describing what you think or know, instead of what you are doing — is the way to go.

Mindcasting vs. lifecasting — Jay Rosen explains in this 4:00 video the difference between mindcasting and lifecasting and why he chooses to mindcast.