Comments on: Twitter Traffic Surges to 10 Million: The Demographics Driving the Growth

By: BarbaraKB

BarbaraKB — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:23:00 +0000

The human feed is winning.... hurray! But Twitter is still best understood by those of us who understand blogging and RSS... and perhaps it's still an older market? Not sure about that still.

Slowly but surely, Twitter, and to some extent Facebook status (threaded convos there so very different) will teach consumers the value of feeded information. It's that *human trust* element folks will always crave online no matter what app or device they use.

Peace, Brian!

By: Suzy Oge

Suzy Oge — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 09:20:00 +0000

I was initially surprised that only 1 in 30 of my business undergrad students at a very entrepreneurial school in the Netherlands has a twitter account, and even the one is not active. But this demographic data reaffirms my observation that the 20 year olds are not very interested in twitter and the more older people use it, the less interested they will be!

By: Sofia

Sofia — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 06:05:00 +0000

All I can say is that Facebook community grows faster that’s what I really notice. I both have twitter and Facebook account but I spend more time twitting:-)

By: adrian chan

adrian chan — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 16:28:00 +0000

wow, that looks like Al Gore's notorious "hockey stick" chart of CO2 level increases since the industrial revolution...

twitter's low barrier to adoption and entry is one reason for its high octane growth. add to that the network effect, with greater numbers of new users able to actually connect with friends, and the move up is likely to only accelerate. networks will "indensify". there will be high rates of churn, as many who joined to check it out drop out when the novelty wears off. but if twitter and its third party apps can help to build micro-communities, there's a good chance that twitter becomes the next facebook -- non profile-based open social networks based on messaging.

brian, do you have anecdotal evidence around what this is doing for and to brands on twitter? how are their efforts scaling as the population explodes?

and does anyone have churn data?

cheers,
adrian

By: Healy Jones

Healy Jones — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:59:00 +0000

Is it possible that Comscore’s age analysis is off because younger users interact with Twitter without going to the site, i.e. via Tweetdeck and texting? I have no idea, but am very curious.

By: Mike Langford

Mike Langford — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 14:45:00 +0000

Very interesting data and analysis. I recently gave a talk at Social Media Jungle Boston in which I asked the question “What happens when the other 90% of the population starts using the conversational web?”

http://blog.tweetworks.com/2009/03/11/tweetworks-tv-episode-42-social-media-jungle-boston/

I think you made the right distinction here in stating that accounts are not active users. It’s also important to remember that more and more of us have multiple accounts. And of course not all unique visitors are equally active.

I’d love to see data on active users. People who tweet multiple times per day and who interact with other users (this would strip out the bots). As I relayed in my story at SMJBOS, I signed up for Twitter and had no real use for it over the first few months I had the account.

I dove in because I was motivated to leverage the tool. I still can’t help but wonder if the average person will be willing to adopt Twitter as it is.

By: JoeC

JoeC — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 14:01:00 +0000

I did a quick survey (using Twitter itself, of course) to find the newest Twitter user I could, and checked their profile internal info using the API. As of about a week ago there had been over 24 million accounts created. Of course, this is not the same as “active users”, since many if not most accounts are dormant or abandonded and many spam accounts have been deleted or deactivated by Twitter. Still, it’s a pretty interesting statistic.