26

Aug

By Dennis R. Mortensen
7 comments
Which Demographic is Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not senior citizens

Before we get started, let it be clear that I LOVE the New York Times, heck, I like just saying the word; the New York Times – and as a data geek I in particular love their data visualization unit (feel free to pack your bags and walk down to 18th street for a Coke at Y!). BUT in today’s online version of the paper, an Article by Claire Cain Miller titled: Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens, I missed a stronger dataset than the casual reference to comScore. However; This made me curious (which might actually be good journalism) – and I decided to do a bit of additional analysis on the question – with a twist.

Which Demographic is Driving Twitter’s popularity; where popularity is measured by the visitors they send me (the publisher).

I looked at 2,394,753 referring visits to 7 unique US News Media sites (Q3 2009). A dataset which is not supposed to represent the twitter universe as a whole, but it is confined to one vertical, and as such can be transposed to the general world; PLUS reading news is after all a pretty general activity. I added in the Age distribution from Google referrers, to provide some additional context. Find the exciting result below:

twitter-demographic

Find the table based data to the chart below. I rounded all percentages because, well, I wanted them to fit on one line.  :-)

0-17 18-24 25-34 35-54 55+
Average Age distribution, all referrers 1% 6% 20% 47% 25%
Age distribution for Google referrers 2% 9% 23% 46% 21%
Age distribution for Twitter referrers 1% 13% 31% 43% 11%

So which Demographic is Driving Twitter’s popularity? where popularity is measured by the visitors they send me (the publisher). Definitely Not Teens as the New York Times correctly pointed out today, BUT neither Senior citizens. If anything Middle Adulthood is the term we should use for the demographic driving Twitter’s success.

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis Mortensen (@dennismortensen)

  • http://huayin.wordpress.com/ huayin wang

    Thanks for sharing this, Dennis!

  • http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

    ..you’re welcome hyayin
    d. :-)

  • http://www.afdeling18.dk Soeren Sprogoe

    Nice data, but I can’t help to think if there’s a basic flaw in your data collection. Or atleast, I’d like some clarification on your data collection methods.

    How do you measure Twitters?

    If you are looking at the referrer, then you are not counting them all. Not even by far.

    Remember that Twitter is as much an API as it is a Social Media platform. This means that people are tweeting from all kinds of applications, both from different websites and even different platforms alltogether.

    Fx. I Tweet a lot from the Gravity app on my Nokia N97 phone, how do you measure visits from me?
    Or people using similar apps on the iPhone, or even desktop PC apps, how do you measure those?

    Or instead of actual visits to a site, are you counting people mentioning the media in their Tweets?
    (Don’t think this is the case, as you mentioned “I looked at 2,394,753 referring visits…”).

  • http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

    Hey Soeren,

    Really great input (thank you) and I couldn’t agree more on the fact that the twitter’s website and its usage is not a fair representative for their overall success. However I changed the question to:

    Q. Which Demographic is Driving Twitter’s popularity; where popularity is measured by the visitors they send me (the publisher).

    So in that regards; I don’t really care about twitter usage in general, I care about the demographic segment WHEN somebody visit me (it doesn’t mean that I cannot see the branding value in NON clicks, but that’s a different debate). I combined all the sources (from twitter.com to URL shortening services) I confidently know are twitter referrers (thus going beyond the twitter website). In the case I didn’t get all of them (referring sites affiliated with twitter), that should not really change the data (which is age distribution buckets) – as different sources would have to dramatically provide a different distribution for the output to change. Am I mumbling now? :-)

    Anywho; to conclude, I agree on your comment in general. I however added a twist to the question and looked at twitter from the point of a publisher receiving traffic from that channel. Why this question? Because I (a publisher) don’t care about whether twitter is successful overall.

    Cheers
    d. :-)

  • http://localseofirm.net James Stratford @JRStratford on Twitter

    You put an interesting twist on this and the outcome is a good one. Though I don’t claim to know all the reasons why it’s true the 35 – 54 year olds are a nice segment of the population and are looking to improve themselves, communicate among themselves, and enrich their life.

  • http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

    Hey James,

    You’re right! And why is it that we end up with this particularly middle adulthood segment – when one look at the service from a distant, it looks VERY teen focused. BUT then again, I am 37 ;-)

    Cheers
    d.

  • Pingback: La rassegna della settimana (27): Google Chrome, Street View e social media | TSW Blog