Twitter is Growing–and Aging
Think Twitter is going down? Think it’s just for kids? You might want to think again. A graph from comScore shows an enormous spike in visits in January and February. Eyeballing the graph shows about 100% growth worldwide, about 5 million more unique visitors.
More recent comScore data on the US market shows a continued surge in visits to the micro-blogging site, from 2 million UVs in January to 9.3 million in March. That’s a 365% increase!
My guess is that Twitter’s most recent explosion in traffic has been magnified by the press. A search for “twitter” in Google News for the past month retrieved over 65,000 results. The same search for all of 2008 retrieved 25,500 results. I don’t understand the nuts and bolts of Google News nearly enough to consider this solid data–but I can say for a fact that I’ve heard more talk and press about Twitter in the past six weeks than I have since the site’s 2006 founding.
Also, traditional mass media typically has an older audience in the US, and this generation has been checking out Twitter–a lot. The largest portion of February’s 4 million UVs were age 45 to 54, according to comScore’s second chart on this page. The second largest group was age 25 to 34, followed by age 35 to 44. (The chart’s time period is not mentioned, but we called to check–it’s for Feb.)
What does this mean? Twitter is exploding, the media is talking about it, and people older than 20-something are checking it out. You cannot assume that the platform is insignificant and only appeals to a younger audience.
Categories: Marketing, Research And Measurement, Social Networking Evangelism Community comScore, Twitter
Definitely! The impact of this medium adds another platform that traditional and digital marketers alike should seriously consider.
That’s an amazing stat that Twitter is growing from the 45-54 demo as well. I know Facebook has been exploding with that demo…but Twitter too.
I am in the 45-54 group, have FACEBOOK and do not like it! Too “busy” with stuff, ads, winks…where is the real conversations and not invites to a fake drink etc? That to me is for the kids. I am going to check out this twitter. Hope is it easier to figure out than FACEBOOK, yuk….
In my Internet marketing business I use both Twitter and Facebook extensively. They both have their different strengths, but so far I have gotten more traffic to my sites from Twitter by far.
I rarely check twitter anymore, if you are targeting/following marketing industry professionals, you are bombarded with ads every few hours. I continue to delete these people but it seems that for every 3 I follow, 2 think I am a service outlet for their advertisements. Facebook is much more personal I believe. I used the following when I was Twitter-Active:
http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/
http://www.tweepular.com/
I lost the url to the one that unfollows anyone that is not following you, but found it to be a good indicator of those that were actually just marketing robots versus real people looking for professional connections.