go-Digital Blog on Digital Marketing

Twitter gains mass awareness but usage remains light

AWARENESS

2010 – 87% awareness

2009 – 24% awareness

2008 – 5% awareness

USAGE

2010

– 1,500 million pageviews per month (71 pageviews per month avg)

– 162 million visits per month (8 visits per month avg)

– 21 million unique visitors per month

Arbitron Figures

2010 – 7% active users (use at least once per month)

2009 – 2% active users

Source: http://www.digidaydaily.com/stories/digital-content-today-arbitron-posts-twitter-numbers

Digital Content Today: Arbitron Posts Twitter Numbers

Media usage tracking company is reporting some surprising numbers on Twitter usage. According to a report in RadioInk, a webinar fromArbitron/Edison Research revealed that 87% of Americans are now aware of Twitter, up from 24% in 2009 and just 5% when the question was first asked, in 2008. But in looking at how many Americans are active users of Twitter — defined as using the service at least once a month — that figure came in at 7%, or about 17 million people, up from 2% in 2009.

Those are huge numbers to be sure, but less that what the blogosphere and assumed ubiquity of Twitter actually seems to be. Edison VP/Strategy & Marketing Tom Webster said awareness of Twitter has soared over a very short period. Webster compared Twitter usage to that of Facebook, the “10-ton gorilla” of social networking, with about six times as many users as Twitter although awareness of the services is roughly equal, and said, “Given that awareness per se is not a constraint, I think the smartest thing you can say about this particular graph is that Twitter has yet to articulate its value to mainstream Americans.”

Arbiron/Edson says that 18% of active Twitter users access the service several times a day and 15 % report they use it at least once a day, while 22% say they’re on Twitter at least once a month. But more than half — 53% — of active Twitter users don’t post tweets themselves and are instead, Webster said, “driven to go there as consumers of broadcast content.”

Other data:
•    About 51 % of active Twitter users are white, 24% are African American — about twice the percentage of African Americans in the general population. The study speculated that African Americans may use Twitter more “conversationally” than other users.
•    About 19% saying they’re “among the first” to buy or try new products, compared to 10 % of the population as a whole. 25% say they buy or try products before others, but not first.
•    They’re also inclined to access the Internet from several locations, and 63% access social networking from a mobile phone, compared to 35 % of all social-network users. And for Twitter users, Webster said, SMS is “pretty much like oxygen”: 92% use SMS, and 73% text multiple times a day.
•    About 42% of monthly Twitter users say they use the service to learn about products and services, and 41% use it to post their own opinions about products, while 31 % seek others’ opinions.

Active Twitter users report spending four hours a day online, compared to about two hours for the general population. But, Webster noted, “the other media here aren’t proportionately lower.” Twitterers spend two hours, 41 minutes a day with radio, compared to two hours, five minutes for the general population, and they spend three hours, 22 minutes with TV, compared to three hours, 25 minutes.

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