Existing Twitter Users Find Their Voice but New Users Are Harder to Find
posted Sunday Jun 3, 2012 by Jon Wurm
Like NBC, Twitter seems to have found it's voice in 2012 according to a study released by Pew Internet. Existing users are Tweeting like never before but new users have been slow to join the flock. Back in 2010 when Pew first looked into Twitter, 8% of Internet users also used Twitter and 2% of adults used them on a daily basis. Fast forward to February 2012 and 15% of all Internet users used Twitter and 8% of adults on the Internet also used Twitter on a daily basis.
Your parents aren't the only people getting in on the action though, young adults (18-24 years old) are carving out their slice of the pie and are the leading demographic in terms of Twitter usage by being the most highly engaged with 31% in February 2012, up from 18% in May 2011. What is responsible for this uptrend in 140-character-or-less communications? Drugs? Crackberries? The insatiable need to remove as much meaning as possible from communications? Find out after the break.
Perhaps all of those are responsible but the Pew report cites the growth in mobile devices, smartphones in particular, as the primary reason for the increase in existing user activity. Some 20% of smartphone users use Twitter and 13% of them do so on a daily basis. The rise of the 18-24 age group is also thought to be due to the increasing rate of adoption for smartphones within that age group.
It seems reasonable that smartphones have a heavy hand in all this, they spend more time and in closer proximity to us than our families and don't require us to be sitting at a desktop computer. I imagine the fact that Twitter isn't a new service has something to do with it as well. They have been around a while and have spidered out into enough of the cracks and crevasses of the Internet that unless you live in a country that blocks the service, you've not only used Twitter before but are familiar with how it works.
