Is Everyone Using Twitter Yet? Nope.
by Peter Kafka
Posted on October 22, 2009 at 6:52 AM PT
The digerati spend a lot of time talking about Twitter’s growth, Twitter’s business and Twitter’s dealmaking. But at this point, many of us tend to take Twitter’s users for granted: We assume that everyone uses it, or at least everyone we know.
But we’re not exactly right. New statistics from the Pew Internet Project indicate that 19 percent of U.S. Internet users are on the service on a regular basis. To spell out the obvious: One in five is a lot of people, but it’s not everyone.
This is worth remembering as Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) move to integrate Twitter updates into search results: Those results come from a particular slice of Web users.
Here’s Pew’s breakdown of that slice, by gender, race and other demographic markers:
Pew says the average age of a Twitter user is 31 (MySpace, 26; Facebook, 33; LinkedIn, 39). And it has some other stats that are useful–and, if you use the service, evident.
For instance, Twitter and mobile are a peanut butter/chocolate combination–25 percent of Internet users with wireless access use the service, compared with eight percent of those who are tethered. And, not surprisingly, gadget junkies are Twitter junkies too: 39 percent of Web users with four or more Internet devices use the service, compared to 10 percent with one device.
The full report is embedded below:
Comments
The title and story are a bit misleading. The Pew study asked if people where using “Twitter or another update service”. The story is written as if 19% are on Twitter, and the study is 19% are using update services. Twitter is but a percentage of that overall market.
Posted by Shane Pearson at October 22nd, 2009 at 7:37 amIt recently struck me, that Twitter was given that name because maybe most of its heavy users are a bunch of twits.
>>RSM
Posted by Richard Mitnick at October 22nd, 2009 at 8:27 amI tried Twitter for about 7 months and found it was useless. Not only were my followers mostly spammers, the others were self-infatuated glory seekers who only wanted to promote themselves.
I also set up a test account on Twitter with NO UPDATES on it at all and it is getting ‘followers’ despite nothing to follow. This means automated spam bots are following everyone so they can spam everyone
no thanks. I canceled my account yesterday and felt liberated from the hype – and that’s all Twitter is, pure hype for suckers
Posted by Sam Harrison at October 22nd, 2009 at 12:51 pmI’m still trying to figure out the real value of Twitter, and so far, I can’t see any.
It would be interesting to know how many tweets are now generated automatically (vs. an actual human doing the tweet).
Posted by Joe Allen at October 22nd, 2009 at 6:56 pm