Last week when I wrote (again) about older women on Facebook, Ailsa Leadbetter was kind enough to point out that comScore had new data about the age of Twitter users—thanks, Ailsa! In the meantime Marketing Charts was kind enough to do an article and chart on the subject, so I’m good to go.
Note that this post is titled “older people,” not “older women.” I can’t find any data. Twitter has a stats page on their blog, but they seem to be focusing on traffic data, not any kind of audience profile. I did find an app that guesses gender from Tweet contents, but I’m interested in data, not silly apps.
Again, I’m left to hypothesize. Here’s what I think is going on:
1.Twitter has taken the business (broadly defined: remember all the Congresspeople Twittering during President Obama’s speech?) world by storm. The data from HubSpot confirm that. It’s 
mostly web/desktop applications that are used for Twittering. There’s a good representation of mobile, but almost no fun stuff with pictures!
2.Many of the business Twitterers are male; a majority? I really don’t know, but somehow I guess “yes” by a small margin.
3.It doesn’t make much difference anyway. The Tweet stream is full of business messages of all kinds; gender is not relevant there.
Still, I’m curious. The comScore data comes from their panel, for which they have gender, so I hope we’ll see gender data at some point. The age data is certainly interesting.
Business/professional use of Twitter undoubtedly accounts for some of what we see in the age data. In my reply to Ailsa’s comment, I said that I probably gave less emphasis than I should have to the greater amount of time available to older people to try new technologies. That argument, however, applies better to the 55+ women on Facebook than it does to the most active, 45-54, age group on Twitter.
What should give us all pause is the comment from the comScore analyst quoted in the Marketing Charts article:
[comScore blogger Sarah] Radwanick concluded that current assumptions about who might use a technology first might need to be reconsidered. “Not only teenagers and college students can be counted among the technologically inclined,” she said. “With those age 25 and older representing a much bigger segment of the population than the under 25 crowd, it might help explain why Twitter has expanded its reach so broadly so quickly over the past few months.”
Marketers take note! The nature of the technology early adopter may be changing before our very eyes!
Monday, April 13, 2009
What Are Older People Doing on Twitter?
Thursday, March 19, 2009
How to Create a Twitter Archive
I’ve been trying to figure out how to create a lasting trail for a particular Tweetstream. In my case, what I want to do is to live-Tweet an event and have a record for posting to a site.
Thanks to Tom Martin for the Tweet that directed me to this post by Jason Baer. He live-Tweeted one of the panels at the South by Southwest Conference, then created an archive of it. Thanks, guys; this is great stuff and it absolutely resolves my issue!
What Jason did was:
• He live-Tweeted a panel at SXSW, giving it a unique hash tag, in his case #dellpanel
• When he saw a Tweet from someone else that he wanted to include, he retweeted it so it would be part of his Tweetstream.
• Then he went to Twitter Search and searched the combination of his hash tag and Twitter username #dellpanel from:jaybaer.
• That produced a complete log of his Twitter posts for the panel!
His original post is charming. People who don’t like something (like work!) often come up with clever ways to avoid it; in Jason’s case it’s having his hands full of stuff!
Whatever his motivation, he came up with a creative, productive use of Twitter. We’ll find more good uses for social media tools as time goes on.
In fact, you can’t look around for information without finding good, new applications. Now I’m off to read an article I found along the way about organizing a successful Tweetup event and start working on my own!
Monday, January 5, 2009
Twittering to Support Their Brands
There’s been controversy lately in the pages of ClickZ about the value of Twitter in business communications, both pro and con.
Comcast, aka ComcastCares, runs its Twitter activity out of the customer service department, and that’s clearly the thrust of the activity, beginning with the name. Dunkin Donuts, on the other hand, started their Twitter program with the rather vague goal of engaging with their loyal customers. Another interesting difference is that the ComcastCares account has a human face, Frank Eliason, their Director of Digital Care. The Dunkin Donuts Twitter page identifies only “Dunkin' Dave, ” whom I would guess to be David Tryder, their Manager of Interactive Marketing. Two points. First, I prefer the identifiable human face—what about you? Second, even though a Twitter account is free, these programs are taking up the time of top marketing executives. They need to be worthy of that time.
The major buzz at the moment is around Scott Monty, formerly of the Crayon agency, who was hired to bring Ford into the social media age. In a short time at Ford he has already used Twitter to good effect in dealing with brand controversies including one with the independent aftermarket products site The Ranger Station. Scott’s full title is Global Digital & Multimedia Communications Manager for Ford and he has a strong strategic perspective on social media, including Twitter. Here’s an interview that’s worth listening to.
Did you know that the Prime Minister of Great Britain twitters? Well, at least someone in his office maintains an account for the PM. Barak Obama used Twitter in the campaign, and I doubt he wrote his messages either. That’s another model.
The take-away from all of this twitter about Twitter is that it does have potential uses, whether as a reputation management tool, a customer service tool, or – more problematically—just to hear what your customers are thinking. The emphasis should be on tool. And the question should be “how does this tool fit into our strategy?” Then there are issues of who has the expertise to do it well and how management is going to evaluate its effectiveness.
All of which says that--unlike individual consumers who may be twittering just for fun--it should be a strategic undertaking, not just “should we twitter?”
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Robust Microblogging Tool
I don’t often write about microblogging. I’m not a road warrior and I have a strong preference for my desktop with its big keyboard and monitor. The limitations of microblogging also don’t fit my concept for this blog.
Ok, so it’s not for me. In spite of that, I see the potential usefulness to some people or in some situations. So I was interested when a colleague brought this site to my attention. It had been sent to her by Dr. Paul Levy, the CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital, whose blog I know. His use of the site suggested it was worth checking out.
The first thing I found was that you can post to many other platforms from Utterli. If you can recognize the icons on the home page, they include all the major blogging services, Twitter, YouTube and others. You can also follow friends on Utterli as you can on other sites like Twitter.
When I looked a little further I found an interview with Dr. Levy himself. He’s talking with WBUR about everything from preventing medical errors to the impact on philanthropy of the Bernard Maddof financial scandal. As a radio station, WBUR is essentially producing podcasts, and they have posted many of them on Utterli. Interesting.
