Twitter demographics

Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has grown at a tremendous rate. From 5,000 tweets per day in 2007 to 200 million tweets per day in 2011. The company isn’t particularly transparent when it comes to its demographic and how actively they interact and participate. There are however a large amount of marketing firms who have conducted independent statistics research studies. These are some interesting twitter demographics I’ve discovered.

 

In 2011 a total of 20.6 million Americans logged in and used the social media network at least one time per month. That’s 8% of US internet users. And even if not everyone in America has access to the internet, 87% of all American are aware of Twitter. There’s also slightly more women in the states who use Twitter, coming at 52% of its members.

The US numbers aren’t in yet for the US in 2012, but there’s a global report stating that there’s 127 million active Twitter users. Compare that to Facebook, which had an astonishing 845 million users. However, while Twitter might be far away from Facebook, Twitter is still increasing in market share. But so is Google+ and Pinterest.

As of 2012 there’s a total of 127 million active Twitter users. No statistics for the US alone, yet.

While early adopters to blogs and Facebook where mostly consisting of younger people, Twitter found its install base within the twenty plus audience. This is still prominent since in 2011, 30% of Twitter users were between the age of 26 to 34. Only 13% where between 18 to 25. While these statistics are base on US demographics, Twitter is a global phenomena.

As of today, in March 2012, Alexa (who is a well respected web information company) has placed Twitter as the tenth most popular site in the world. Google, Facebook and Youtube are currently holding the top three rankings. Among the top countries who use the social media service are European countries such as the UK, but also India, Brazil and Australia. A country like Japan often use their own Japanese alternatives to search engines or networking sites such as Google and Facebook. But with Twitter it’s different as Japan makes up of 7.1% of the networks total traffic.

Twitter demographics is key to understanding its communication

While I continue my research, I find these Twitter demographics to be interesting and I might include them in my paper. The one thing that surprises me the most is the age demographic. I imagined the audience to be much younger – And this will be important in the upcoming Twitter marketing tests I’m going to perform.

But I will need more information about the marketing demographics surrounding Twitter users. This will be featured in an upcoming blog post!

The infographics were made by Digital surgeons and Anson Alex.