Winning Mark

Winning Mark recently hosted a Twitter webinar for a number of non-profit groups, explaining and answering questions about the uses of the social media site. We wanted to post some of the great questions that came out of the webinar (and their answers) here. Melinda Hemmelgarn (the “food sleuth”), an Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy Food and Society Fellow, asked:

Q: What is the demographic of tweeters?

A: There are several reports on Twitter demographics:

The Pew Internet & American Life Project released a study of Twitter demographics in February 2009, finding that:

* 35% of Twitter users live in urban areas
* 9% live in rural areas
* 17% of internet users in households earning less than $30,000 tweet
* 10% of internet users in households earning more than $75,000 tweet
* 76% of Twitter users use the internet wirelessly
* Median age is around 31
* 82% of users have a cell phone and use it to text regularly
* Nearly 1 in 10 blog regularly

Quantcast is an internet research service that tracks demographics and other metrics for websites. They don’t track Twitter directly, but they estimate that it has the following demographics (out of approximately 27 million U.S. visitors per month):

* 55% female, 45% male
* 43% of users are 18-34, 30% are 35-49
* 78% Caucasian, 11% African-American, 6% Hispanic/Latino, 3% Asian, 1% Other
* 42% of users have children 0-17 in their household
* 43% are college graduates

eMarketer estimates that Twitter has approximately 12.1 million users (a subset of total visitors), accounting for over 7% of the U.S. internet-using population.

Posted by Claire Stein-Ross on August 18, 2009 in Featured, Home Page, Social Media