Eight Percent Tweet Daily ... Are You One of Them?
Twit or tweet?
However you refer to it, only eight percent of Americans online utilize the microblogging site known as Twitter, daily. Overall, Twitter users represent six percent of the American population.
Twitter is a social networking service that allows you to answer the question, "What are you doing?" by sending short text messages 140 characters in length, called "tweets", to your friends or "followers".
The PEW report finds that the majority of Twitter users fall into one of three categories: young adults, minorities, or urbanites.
- Young adults – Internet users ages 18-29 are significantly more likely to use Twitter than older adults.
- African-Americans and Latinos – Minority internet users are more than twice as likely to use Twitter as are white internet users.
- Urbanites – Urban residents are roughly twice as likely to use Twitter as rural dwellers.
No matter who uses the service and when, a reported 71 percent of tweets are ignored. Most tweets aren’t even original mini-blogs. They are retweets, or a sharing of another’s tweet word for word.
What are people using Twitter for, other than announcing someone else’s status? Some share observations about their personal and/or professional life. This could be a link directed to a blog post, a photograph, a news article; you get the idea. One in ten tweets about work related issues while seven in ten boast about their personal information. Twitter allows users to identify what the current trends and rages are.
I use Twitter but it has taken a long time to jump on the band wagon. As a blog author, I use the service to promote new posts. Twitter is also very useful in my personal life as a wife, mother and postpartum depression survivor/fighter, with the use of hashtags (used to represent grouping of special interests).
Many people don’t understand or accept the use of Twitter. They don’t have to use it. I’ll just sit here, behind the keyboard of my computer or cell phone and share it with the rest who do.
My latest tweet: Raining out, that means I will be a ray of light today.
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