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.