What's Up With Twitter???
As a social network, Twitter revolves around the principle of followers. When you choose to follow another Twitter user, that user's tweets appear in reverse chronological order on your main Twitter page. If you follow 20 people, you'll see a mix of tweets scrolling down the page: breakfast-cereal updates, interesting new links, music recommendations, even musings on the future of education.
Tweet contents
San Antonio-based market-research firm Pear Analytics analyzed 2,000 tweets (originating from the US and in English) over a two-week period in August 2009 from 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM (CST) and separated them into six categories:
- Pointless babble – 40%
- Conversational – 38%
- Pass-along value – 9%
- Self-promotion – 6%
- Spam – 4%
- News – 4%
Social networking researcher Danah Boyd responded to the Pear Analytics survey by arguing that what the Pear researchers labelled "pointless babble" is better characterized as "social grooming" and/or "peripheral awareness" (which she explains as persons "want[ing] to know what the people around them are thinking and doing and feeling, even when co-presence isn't viable").
Demographic
Twitter is mainly used by older adults who might not have used other social sites before Twitter, said Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst studying social media. "Adults are just catching up to what teens have been doing for years," he said.According to comScore only eleven percent of Twitter's users are aged twelve to seventeen.comScore attributes this to Twitter's "early adopter period" when the social network first gained popularity in business settings and news outlets attracting primarily older users. However, comScore as of late, has stated that Twitter has begun to "filter more into the mainstream", and "along with it came a culture of celebrity as Shaq, Britney Spears and Ashton Kutcher joined the ranks of the Twitterati."
According to a study by Sysomos in June 2009, women make up a slightly larger Twitter demographic than men - fifty-three percent over forty-seven percent. It also stated that five percent of users accounted for seventy-five percent of all activity, and that New York has the most Twitter users.
According to Quancast, twenty-seven million people in the US used Twitter as of September 3, 2009. Sixty-three percent of Twitter users are less than thirty-five years old; sixty percent of Twitter users are Caucasian, but a higher than average (compared to other Internet properties) are African American (sixteen percent) and Hispanic (eleven percent); fifty-eight percent of Twitter users have a total household income of at least $60,000.
| Twitter.com Top5 Global Markets by Reach (%) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| COUNTRY | Percent | |||
| Indonesia Jun-2010 | 20.8% | |||
| Indonesia Dec-2010 | 19.0% | |||
| Brazil Jun-2010 | 20.5% | |||
| Brazil Dec-2010 | 21.8% | |||
| Venezuela Jun-2010 | 19.0% | |||
| Venezuela Dec-2010 | 21.1% | |||
| Netherlands Jun-2010 | 17.7% | |||
| Netherlands Dec-2010 | 22.3% | |||
| Japan Jun-2010 | 16.8% | |||
| Japan Dec-2010 | 20.0% | |||
