Twitterati Going Strong at 8 Percent

Tweet, do you? You're among the 8% of Americans online who do, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. The center emphasizes the word online there, to differentiate from the mobile Twitter crowd. That's probably a good thing, since the number of Twitter users by mobile phone is probably much larger, although, as with yours truly, that number could include people who do both.

Seems that more women tweet than men and more people under 30 and Latino than other ages and races. The survey also found more Tweets coming from urban areas than from rural or suburban areas. (That's probably to be expected given that the survey asked online users.)

The survey sample was a respectable 2,257 Internet users, whose main vocation in the Twitterverse was posting personal updates. An overwhelming percentage (72, to be precise) of users reported using their Twitter feeds to issue updates on their personal situations. Work status updates weren't far behind. The bar graph starts to level off, however, with categories of activity like sharing links to news stories, retweeting other people's updates, and sharing photos and videos. (Presumably, Stephen Fry would have answered in the affirmative for all categories.)

Nearly a quarter of Twitter users surveyed check for other people's posts more than once a day. That's the fun of it really, isn't it, to see what other people are saying? Otherwise, it's just a dump of information into the world of digital recording.

Still, the overwhelming conclusion from this figure of 8% is that it isn't a huge number. Twitter gets a lot of publicity because a lot of quite public are tweeting quite publicly and often (such as the aforementioned Mr. Fry), but the numbers overall compared to the rest of the American online public are quite small, despite every tweet being archived in the Library of Congress. Perhaps the other 92% haven't figured out yet that they can distill the various bits of their daily lives into 140-character sound bytes.

In the meantime, you can follow this author's tweets here.