Thoughts on Pew statistics

About 19 percent of Americans use Twitter or a similar status update service, according to figures from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. That's up from 11 percent of Americans earlier in the year.

Other interesting tidbits from the survey:

• Of those people who have four or more Internet-connected devices, 39 percent use Twitter or a similar service.
• The median age of Twitter users is 31.
• The median age of Facebook users is 33.

This is important too:

It will probably become more difficult to track status updating as an independent activity as social network updates feed into Twitter and vice versa. For now, it is clear that a "social segment" of internet users is flocking to both social network sites and status update services. This segment is likely to grow as ever more internet users adopt mobile devices as a primary means of going online.

Takeaways:

About one in five Internet users use Twitter, which is a lot, but not even close to a majority. No doubt, this number will grow over time, but it's worth keeping in mind for making strategy now.

The business world loves statistics because they allow for strategic planning. But statistics will become harder and harder to track for social media as open APIs melt the walls between the various social networks. This will make it harder for corporation-run news to quantify how much return they're getting for their investment into social media.

In other words, they will know that they should be on social media, but it won't be easy to prove just what it's doing for their bottom line.

Related posts:

1. Pew releases its ‘Millenials’ report
2. Content Creation: Sharing, remixing, blogging, and more | Pew Internet & American Life Project
3. Dabblers go home; journalists need to be social media leaders
4. Pew Report: Most Americans wouldn’t care much if their local newspapers disappeared
5. Thoughts on “Network”