As of December 2008, 11% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter or another service that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others.
Twitter and similar services have been most avidly embraced by young adults. Nearly one in five (19%) online adults ages 18 and 24 have ever used Twitter and its ilk, as have 20% of online adults 25 to 34. Use of these services drops off steadily after age 35 with 10% of 35 to 44 year olds and 5% of 45 to 54 year olds using Twitter. The decline is even more stark among older internet users; 4% of 55-64 year olds and 2% of those 65 and older use Twitter.
Posts Tagged: statistics
12
Feb 09
Pew Internet: Twitter and status updating
28
Jan 09
Pew Internet: Generations Online in 2009
Useful new data from Pew on internet adoption/activity by generation.
Over half of the adult internet population is between 18 and 44 years old. But larger percentages of older generations are online now than in the past, and they are doing more activities online, according to surveys taken from 2006-2008.
This report serves as a compilation of adoption statistics from a number of Pew’s studies. Attention should be paid to the methodology, as the margins of error are high on the weighted populations.
Download the full report at Pew Internet: Generations Online in 2009.
28
Jan 08
How many Americans use social networking sites?
I spent a few hours last week trying to track down good statistics on SNS adoption for a chapter I was writing. The stats generally break down into one of three categories: 1) Self-reports from social network sites, 2) Localized studies (adoption at campus X) or 3) Population samples (Pew). The Pew Internet and American Life project has the best statistics around on youth adoption (12-18), but I couldn’t find a recent number that is a broader population sample.
Thankfully, Pew’s Research Center for People and the Press solved my problem with a report entitled “Internet’s Broader Role in Campaign 2008.” In this survey, social networking site use was explored, with the researchers finding that 22% of Americans use SNS. Broken down by age range, 67% of those age 18-29, 21% of those 30-39, and 6% of those 40+ use SNS. Based on 1430 respondents, margin of error should be about +/- 3%. This is a nice statistic for those who have been relying on self-reports and press accounts.
Update: To put these into “absolute” numbers, I’ve used the most recent census population estimates (11/07). Note, both the Pew statistics and census statistics are confidence samples, so the combined margin of error applies.
Statistical breakdown:
- US SNS users aged 12-14: 5,560,749* (45% of total population 12-14: 12,357,222)
- US SNS users aged 15-17: 8,331,631* (65% of total population 15-17: 13,018,174)
- US SNS users aged 18-29: 34,251,555* (67% of total population 18-29: 51,121,724)
- US SNS users aged 30-39: 8,599,930* (21% of total population 30-39: 40,952,050)
- US SNS users aged 40+: 8,235,988*,** (6% of total population 40+: 137,266,473)
- Total US SNS users (excluding ages less than 12): 64,979,853 (+/- ~4,000,000)
*Notes on Margin of Error: US Census standard 90%, Pew hasn’t released the statistical evaluation on the 2008 survey.
** This includes individuals aged 40-100. An appropriate methodology would oversample younger users in this range, likely reducing this total population.
Links to Pew Studies:
- Internet’s Broader Role in Campaign 2008. Kohut et. al. 2008.
- Teens, Privacy and Online Social Networks. Lenhart and Madden. 2007.
1
Aug 07
ComScore on Social Network Growth
Yesterday, comScore released some new numbers on social network site growth over the past year. The numbers are interesting, yet expected. Comparing unique visitors from June of 2006 and 2007, Facebook shows tremendous growth, along with significant movement for Bebo and Tagged. Myspace and others continue to grow at a remarkable pace, but the story of the stats is Facebook. Of course, comparison at a one-year interval can be somewhat misleading, especially in the fast-moving world of SNS, so to have these broken down quarterly would have been a lot more interesting.
In fact, the most interesting statistic comScore produced was a breakdown of SNS visitors by geographic region. While there isn’t anything too surprising – Facebook is huge in the US, Bebo large in Europe, and Orkut dominates Latin America – I was interested to see Tagged’s fairly even distribution among a number of geographic areas.
27
Apr 07
Time’s Questionable Web 2.0 Measurements
Time Magazine (via Smart Mobs) has published a dubious article questioning participation in Web 2.0. Entitled “Who’s Really Participating in Web 2.0“, the piece examines how many of us are the “writers” on the read/write web. The author ultimately waffles on a meaningful conclusion, though he hints that Web 2.0 is far from fulfilling its potential. Of course I agree with that, but I really don’t like the statistics the author has used to demonstrate his point.
According to Hitwise, only 0.2% of visits to YouTube are users uploading a video, 0.05% visits to Google Video include uploaded videos and 0.16% of Flickr visits are people posting photos. Only the social encyclopedia Wikipedia shows a significant amount of participation, with 4.56% of visits to the site resulting in content editing.
Not only is the percentage of participation very small online, there are some very strong skews as to who is participating. Visitors to Wikipedia are almost equally split 50/50 men and women, yet edits to Wikipedia entries are 60% male. The gender gap is even greater for YouTube, a site whose visitors are equally male and female, but whose uploaders are over 76% male.
The fundamental problem with the analysis is that sites like Youtube, Flickr and Google Video (and by proxy, Web 2.0) are set up as if there is supposed to be a meaningful upload/download ratio by visit. Video and images are inherently built to be consumed; with the viral nature of Youtube or Flickr, we’re have to be constantly uploading to ever get anywhere near the 80/20 rule the writer cites. In a recent survey I did, I found that over 2 Million videos were uploaded to YouTube each month. That’s a huge amount – but compared to the number of visits Youtube gets by bored office workers and procrastinating graduate students? No way that ratio is ever going to be 80/20, nor should it. The uploading of a video and the viewing of a video are not equivalent actions in any way, and not a reasonable predictor of “participation.”
Instead, the author should have looked at the recent Pew Survey on teen internet behavior. In the national survey, the authors Mary Madden and Amanda Lenhart found that 47% of teens have uploaded photos online (with gender split at 54%F/40%M, nothing like that 25%F/75%M Hitwise found). In addition, the Pew survey found that 14% of all online teens had uploaded videos, and 22% of teens who use social networking as video posters. This is much more meaningful and representative than the upload/no-upload dichotomy Hitwise utilizes.
24
Apr 07
The Myspace Report – Never Ending Friending
Today, Myspace released a snazzy market intelligence report (PDF download) to some of its top media clients. Forbes’ Rachel Rosmarin has the most-blogged coverage, though I’ve seen many media outlets covering the press release as well.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way – this survey was constructed to glorify Myspace, which is actually not that hard of a thing to do. That said, I didn’t find any major red flags – I actually found it somewhat interesting (as long as you take it for what it is). Here are two nuggets I enjoyed.
The first question examines the effect of social networking on alternative media consumption. Assuming a margin of error of 3.5%, there are significant negative effects for video games, but significant positive effects for the internet, email (weird? possible misleading wording leading to conflation of ‘messaging’ with email), IM and cell phone (also a little surprising, seems spurious). Put simply, this means that social networking leads us away from a solitary activity like video games, but it makes us engage more with social technologies such as a cell phone.
I’m most interested in the significant negative effect for video games. Assuming that most video game play is not a social experience (in gross hours played), it is interesting to see social engagement winning out over non-social engagement (in the time-wasting space). Not that this is surprising, but, cool to see.
This is reinforced by another question “If you had 15 minutes of time, which activity would you most like to do.” This was interesting to me because I think it illustrates our complicated relationship with social networks (especially Myspace). Again, assuming a 3.5% margin of error, social networking is significantly preferrable to video games, IM, and listening to an MP3 player or the radio (mostly solitary experiences, exception IM). It is not significantly preferable to chatting on a cell phone, generally surfing, or watching TV. With the exception of TV, which is a pseudo-social experience, those other experiences were social.
Let’s not demean the value of social networking – I think it’s incredible that social networks are as favored a time waster as TV or talking on a cell phone. I just think that we’re seeing a canary in a cave mine here – given a choice, we are ultimately more interested in engaging in social experiences in our time wasting than non-social experiences. We’re social beings, and the technologies we use allow this engagement – and we prefer them.
If I were a marketer reading the tea leaves from this report, I’d pay very close attention to the value of social engagement. As technology allows us to interact with each other, we’re seeing a halo effect carrying over to other social technologies. Myspace (and social networking) is currently the most important place because it enables social serendipity, but there are certainly other innovative ways to spread the effects of a social networking campaign to other media.
Download the report here.
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
