Pew Research has published a new report which looks at key trends and traits among US Twitter users, and how they relate to the wider population.
And the insights, gleaned from a survey of more than 2,791 adult Twitter users, reveal some important points of note for marketers – to start with, according to the data, the majority of Twitter users are ‘lurkers’ – i.e. they read tweets but don’t often post themselves.
This is likely why Twitter is continually rolling out new tools to prompt more engagement – while having people come to the app at all is a good thing, having more people actively participate is key to making that usage sticky and keeping users around.
From a marketing perspective, this could underline the potential of influencer marketing on the platform. With a relatively small amount of users actually tweeting, that means there are a lot of users simply tuning in, which indicates that those top tweeters have a captive audience that’s ready to listen.
It might also confuse Twitter’s on-platform stats a little. While users can buy likes, its much harder to fake actual engagement, which has seen replies become a better measure of actual influence and activity in some respects. If the vast majority of Twitter users aren’t actually tweeting, that makes actual engagement a little harder to measure in this respect.
Interestingly, Pew’s data also shows that the most active Twitter users are more likely to be women – and crucially, this small minority is much more likely to tweet about politics. […]
Click here to read the full article from socialmediatoday.com
