Twitter More Popular Among Minorities

I find it increasingly fascinating when the Pew Research Center releases information on Twitter and “personal update” based services on the Internet. It is good for the Internet, the technology, and the people behind the content to have research and data to build cases in support of using Twitter as a marketing vehicle.

Pew recently released their findings on a research report called The People Who Use Twitter. What is interesting about this report is that this is one of the first times Pew has released something pertaining to one site instead of multiple. They have always focused on the functionality instead of the tool. For example:

Our status update question in eight surveys between August 2008 and September 2010 asked, “Do you ever use the Internet to use Twitter or another service to share updates aout yourself or to see updates about others?” In August 2008, 6% of internet users said “yes” to that question. In September 2010, 24% of internet users said “yes.”

This information was interesting on multiple levels… however it did not pertain strictly to Twitter… they changed that. The People Who Use Twitter report has some extremely interesting information regarding Twitter use including:

• White, non hispanic users are at about 5% while Black are at 13%
• 10% of internet users in each group who Twitter have said to have a Household income between $50k-$75k
• Urban residents are roughly twice as likely to use Twitter as rural dwellers
• Minority internet users are twice as likely to use Twitter as white internet users

This goes to show that you can never take the users of a site, tool, or technology at face value. Research needs to be conducted in order to fully understand the usage of Twitter (or any social media site for that matter).

Twitter is growing and at a rapid pace… How are you implementing the system?