Surprising Twitter Statistics
Twitter has been all over the news lately, and its potential utility to marketing has been the focus. Surprisingly, when I was looking for some kind of demographic information for Twitter about a month ago, I was surprised to find absolutely nothing except for a quantcast estimation!
So I took it upon myself to conduct some research. I created a quick easy survey, so as not to scare people away from participation.
The survey was basically launched by spam-attacks, creating an account and using a php script to automatically build a following and send out direct messages asking people to participate in a quick survey. The only three questions asked were sex, age, and race.
I’m not sure exactly how representative the responses were, as I am no statistics expert, but I have taken a class or two. Surprisingly, I was able to garner nearly 13,000 responses to this survey. Considering Twitter’s total usership is approximately 18 million, this only represents about half of a tenth of a percent of the total user base.
Of the 13,000 or so responses, I filtered approximately 4,000 for either being outside of the U.S. or for duplicate responses. The survey had a drawing-based prize compensation, so some users responded more than once; I removed all duplicate I.P. addresses. Also, the scope of this survey was U.S. usership, so any foreign sources were not counted.
I imagine that, due to the nature of the survey distribution model, there is an unfair distribution to more frequent/more highly connected users, but for marketing purposes I think this is alright. The survey began collecting data July 1st and was closed July 20th.
These charts and graphs sum up the results of the survey. In blue is the results from my Twitter study. The red bars represent the US population. I obtained data for US demographics from a variety of sources and are for reference only. Actual U.S. values may vary.
Twitter Sex Demographics
Male : 4,304 Responses (45%)
Female : 5.249 Responses (55%)
There appear to be slightly more females using Twitter than there are males, though it is fairly close to half. Maybe it has something to do with that baby-blue bird?
Twitter Age Demographics
3-12 : 171 Responses (2%)
13-17 : 603 Responses (6%)
18-24 : 4,208 Responses (45%)
35-49 : 3,248 Responses (34%)
50+ : 1,223 Responses (13%)
Age group was right where I expected it to be, mainly trendy college students. I was a little surprised that there were more people in the 50+ group than in the 13-17 group. Come to think of it, I actually don’t know any middle-schoolers on Twitter, and it is on CNN more than MTV…
Racial Demographics
Survey participants were asked to select all that apply. Most (approximately 95%) chose only one, but some chose more than one. The data was aggregated into single fields, so some participants were counted in more than one category.
Caucasian : 4,901 Responses (52%)
African-American : 3,521 Responses (36%)
Asian : 750 Responses (8%)
Hispanic : 503 Responses (6%)
Other : 199 Responses (2%)
This one was a little surprising, because I had always thought that Twitter was mostly a nerdy white person thing. I even expected it to be a math-crazy Asian thing. But shockingly, black people love Twitter. Goes to show, your racial perceptions aren’t always right!
I’m releasing these survey results under the Creative Commons License. Feel free to do with it what you please, though I ask that you do not fudge the results for any reason. Also, if you publish it, I’d prefer if you drop a link to The Kevin Dolan!
