Who’s a-twittering?

rob February 27, 2009 social media, strategy View Comments

Pew Internet & American Life Project released a report Feb 12: Twitter and status updating.  Some really interesting numbers and demographics came out of it (that shouldn’t be all that surprising):

Growth of Microblogging American Adults 

  • 6% in May 2008  (used Twitter, status updates, etc)
  • 9% in November 2008
  • 11% in December 2008

Ages of People Using Twitter

  • 19% online adults aged 18-24 (use Twitter, status updates, etc)
  • 20% online adults aged 25-34
  • 10% online adults aged 35-44
  • 5% or less for online adults over 45

Median ages for some social media sites:

At first I was a little surprised that the median age for Facebook is younger than MySpace. However, thinking about the growth of Facebook vs MySpace, it seems that the kids who started on MySpace are still there and their numbers are not growing as compared to Facebook (where the cool kids and adults now hang out).


Chart: Unique Visitors to Facebook.com vs MySpace.com

Hopefully the surprise isn’t that the young’ins are using social media, but that there may be more “older” folks using these tools than you once thought.  My own observation is that the people I graduated from High School with is around the cut off for adopters of social media.  I’d guess that maybe half of my class (’89) are on Facebook, the full class older than me (’85) has many less, and the full class younger (’93) have a much higher number online.

So the takeaway isn’t to go open up a Twitter account, etc, and call yourself “arrived”, “hip”, “young again”, or “groovy”. Nope.  In fact, stay out! That is until you have a plan — a strategy of how you’ll use the tools to connect and interact with the people who are there. Otherwise you’ll just be a-wandering around looking foolish and we’ll all tweet behind your back calling you a “fogey” and “fuddy duddy”. Ouch.

If you want to connect with me on Twitter, feel free.  I’m @orangejack.

UPDATE: After posting this, I found some great stats not about who is on twitter, but HOW we use twitter.

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  • http://www.mylifeislikeasong.blogspot.com Suze20TO

    Another reason for the MySpace age being elevated (imo) may be that it’s more difficult to hide your age on MySpace (almost impossible) so some people will put a very fake age (like 90-100 years). Not sure if there would be enough to skew the results (or whether there are also some who are eternally 29 as well).

    On Facebook, people are connecting more with high school/university classes so people are more apt to enter their real ages. In my community, young kids (13 and up) are on Facebook rather than MySpace with their classmates. Facebook seems to be a more controlled (and private) environment for the early teens, so if this is occuring in other communities as well, it could lower the Facebook median age.

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