Social Media Facts: Twitter

Wikipedia says: “Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications.

Facts:

• In the past 24 hours, 68,900,000 pages were either created or modified on Twitter
• 72.5% of the 44 million Twitter users joined during the first five months of 2009
• 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people
• More than 50% of all updates are published using tools, mobile and Web-based, other than Twitter.com. TweetDeck is the most popular non-Twitter.com tool with 19.7% market share.
• There are more women on Twitter (53%) than men (47%)
• Twitter age demographic (% of total) Ages: 25-34 - 20%, 35-49 - 42%, 55+ - 17%

Businesses can use Twitter to share news and announcements with people interested in your company (followers), track unsolicited feedback, provide public customer service and FAQs, and potentially build relationships with customers, partners and other people who are interested in your company.

Individuals, customers, can use Twitter to tell a company, or anyone else, what they think about your product or service.  It could be that they’ve had a great, or disappointing, experience with your business.  It can also be used to suggest product ideas and to learn about great offers.

Twitter needs to make changes soon or slowly decline in popularity.  They need to be profitable to fund their growth and enhancements. They either need more robust data relationships, an advertising model, or a premium subscription model.  They will likely be bought by someone who understands how to do all three.