Commentary
ComScore: 8% Of U.S. Smartphone Users On Twitter
- by Mark Walsh @markfwal, August 12, 2010
In new data released Thursday, comScore said Twitter is gaining ground among smartphone owners, with 8% of high-end phone users in the U.S. tweeting away. But that level of penetration (4.2 million people) still seems quite low given Twitter has 100 million users worldwide. Uptake among smartphone users in Europe is even lower, at 2.8%.
Isn't most Twitter use, at least in the U.S, already on mobile devices? The comScore report makes it sound as if the idea of using Twitter on their mobile phone had just occurred to people: "For applications such as Twitter that function as an instantaneous broadcast medium, the mobile device represents the ideal platform to engage with this content anytime and anyplace," said Graham Mudd, comScore vice president, search & media, in a statement.
Well, duh. The 140-character limit was inspired by text-messaging, so mobile is a natural fit.
More surprising is that Twitter finds its highest proportion of users not in the U.S.(11.9%) but in Indonesia (20.8%), followed closely by Brazil (20.5%) and Venezuela (19%). With Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez joining Twitter in late April, comScore said Twitter.com penetration in the country spiked 4.8 percentage points in a few months. Does that make it the official microblogging service of Venezuela?
Twitter use has grown fastest across Latin America a whole over the last year, jumping 305% to 15.4 million monthly unique visitors as of June. Asia Pacific was the second, climbing 243%to 25.1 million visitors, followed by the Middle-East/Africa, up 142% to 5 million visitors, and Europe, increasing 106% to 22.5 million.
In North America, where Twitter has a more mature user base, use grew 22% to nearly 25 million visitors. Twitter.com had 93 million visitors overall in June, more than double the total a year ago. (That doesn't include usage of Twitter-based applications such as TweetDeck.)
Mark Walsh can be reached at walsh@mediapost.com
What this actually means is that in the U.S., feature phone users are more likely to tweet. At just 8% penetration vs. 11% overall, US smartphone users would be significantly UNDERrepresented in Twitville.
Does the higher-than-expected penetration of tweeting feature phones tell us something about likely Twitter usage occasions (personal "brand"-building to one's many, many followers) versus 'corporate' usage as a business-related broadcast platform where smartphone penetration would be de rigeur? Does this in turn, bespeaks a generational divide among Early Adopters?
What it says to me is that, at this point along the adoption curve, Brands using Twitter hoping to communicate with an affluent NON-teeneybopper audience are probably wasting their tweets. Also accounts for the banality and self-absorption of the Twitter environment.