A Few Good Answers to Your Question: Why Twitter?

I've been seeing a lot of Twitter-haters out there. You know who you are!

The jury is still out, but the short answer is that if you want to continue (or even begin) to reach younger, tech-savvy audiences, you're going to have to work on your resistance.

Sure, you still need to think about whether it is really worth your time. But here are a few stats to help you decide whether to jump in, courtesy of a research librarian who posted these links on a discussion group sponsored by Resources for Cross Cultural Health Care and the DiversityRx website.

"Pew Research published research on Twitter users in February 2009: . Not surprisingly, they found that young adults (18-24) are the heaviest adopters. The researcher also points out that lower income households are more likely to have Twitter users: "17% of internet users in households earning less than $30,000 tweet ... compared with 10% of those earning more than $75,000 annually".

However, the Twitter landscape is changing quickly and analysis performed at different times can result in varying conclusions about user demographics. Blogging in March 2009, Nick Burcher provided more Twitter data: 

Both Burcher and Pew show data that points to Twitter users being from diverse communities, reflecting the demographics of the younger population of the U.S. And don't forget that Twitter is used in multiple countries. U.S. users are only 40% of the entire Twitter user population."

Topics: Building Community, Education, Language, Social networking, Web 2.0