CorpComms Magazine

Eight per cent of online Americans use Twitter but just two per cent do so in a typical day, according to a new survey by Pew Internet; American Life Project.

With an online population comprising 74 per cent of American adults, this means that six per cent of the entire adult population uses Twitter.

The survey found that women are twice as likely to use Twitter than men, while minority Internet users are more than twice as likely to tweet than white Internet users.

Ten per cent of online females tweet while just five per cent of online pensioners, aged 65 and over, are Twitter users.

The typical Twitter user is aged between 18 and 29 years old and is likely to have a college education and live in a town. People who live in rural communities are half as likely to tweet as their urban neighbours.

One quarter of Twitter users check their accounts several times a day, while 12 per cent check them once a day and seven per cent only every few weeks. One in five of those signed up to Twitter never check for new material on the site.

Almost three quarters of Twitter users post updates related to their personal life, while 62 per cent send updates on their working lives and 54 per cent post observations about life in general. More than half of Twitter users (55 per cent) post links to news stories while 53 per cent retweet material posted by others, with 18 per cent of these doing so daily.

Just one in four users tweet their location, but just seven per cent of users do so on a daily basis. Four out of ten use Twitter to share photos, while 28 per cent use the social networking site to share videos.

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