• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, December 31, 2010

According to the first-ever survey reading from Pew Research that exclusively examines Twitter users, 8% of online adults said they do use Twitter, with 2% doing so on a typical day. This survey also showed that 74% of American adults are Internet users, meaning that the Twitter cohort amounts to 6% of the entire adult population.

Twitter Use By Demographic Group (% Users in Each Group)
	% Using Twitter
All Internet Users	8%
Gender
Men	7%
Women	10
Age
18-29	14
30-49	7
50-64	6
65+	4
Race/Ethnicity
White, non-Hispanic	5
Black, non-Hispanic	13
Hispanic	18
Household Income
< $30,000	10
$30-49.9K	6
$50-74.9K	10
$75K	6
Education
< High School	n/a
High School	5
Some College	9
College+	9
Geography
Urban	11
Suburban	8
Rural	5
Source: Pew Research Center, November 2010

The message service Twitter launched on July 15, 2006 now claims tens of millions of users worldwide. It is one of the most popular online activities among tech enthusiasts and has become a widely used tool among analysts to study the conversations and interests of users, buzz about news, products or services, and announcements by commercial, non-profit, and government organizations.

Some of the groups who are notable for their relatively high levels of Twitter use include:

·      Young adults: Internet users ages 18-29 are significantly more likely to use Twitter than are older adults

·      African-Americans and Latinos: Minority internet users are more than twice as likely to use Twitter as are white internet users

·      Urbanites: Urban residents are roughly twice as likely to use Twitter as rural dwellers

·      Women and the college-educated are also slightly more likely than average to use the service

Twitter users are nearly equally divided between those who check the site on a daily basis (or multiple times per day) and those who check the site infrequently or never. Just over one-third of Twitter users check for material posted by others on a daily basis or multiple times per day, roughly comparable with the 41% who say they check the site less than every few weeks, or never do so at all.

Frequency of Twitter User Checking For Posts (% of Users)
Frequency	% of Twitter Users
Several times a day	24%
Once a day	12
1-2 days/week	12
3-5 days/week	5
Every few weeks	7
Less Often	20
Never	21
Source: Pew Research Center, November 2010

The survey asked how often users check the site for updates about others, and how often (if ever) they use the site to post their own content. Asking about nine different types of content that Twitter users might post to the site, the users tend to comment on a relatively wide range of topics: the typical user posts four of the nine different types of tweets we asked about in our survey.

Overall, observations related to users' personal or professional lives are the most popular types of updates, while location-based tweets and links to videos are the least commonly mentioned:

·      72% of Twitter users say that they post updates related to their personal life, activities or interests. 19% say they post personal updates once a day or more

·      62% said they post updates related to their work life, activities or interests, with 12% doing so on a daily basis

·      55% of users share links to news stories. 12% do this at least once a day

·      54% of these Twitter users say they post humorous or philosophical observations about life in general, with 16% doing so on a daily basis

·      53% of users use Twitter to retweet material posted by others, with 18% doing so on a daily basis

·      52% of these users send direct messages to other users, with 11% doing so on a daily basis

·      40% use Twitter to share photos with others, with 12% going so at least once a day

·      28% use Twitter to share videos with others. 8% of Twitter users do this once a day or more

·      24% use the service to tweet their location, with 7% of users doing so on a daily basis

Finally, comparing the average viewing time of 103,731,006 random video streams discovered on several leading social networks and search engines, the average video stream sourced via Twitter is viewed for two minutes and seven seconds. No other social network or search engine analyzed broke the two-minute mark.Yahoo followed with an average Twitter viewing time of one minute and 54 seconds, closely trailed by Facebook with an average viewing time of one minute and 50 seconds. Search engines Google (1:27) and Bing (1:09) had significantly shorter average online video viewing times.

To learn more about the study, and access the PDF file from PEW, please visit here.