Tweet this
»Twitter, with over 500 million users, is the world's second most popular social network. Many think that Facebook, which has over a billion users, is for adolescents, who like to post cat pictures. Twitter, in the popular mind, is where grownups express themselves.
A new study analysed 36 million Twitter users to find out who they are and why they do what they do. If you are a serious Twitter user chances are that you are a woman, young and live either in the US or UK. Fifty-three per cent of the Twitter users are women, the pattern holds good across the developed countries. But in the developing world men come to the fore. In India about 80% of users are men.
But women are more active on the network and tweet more. They have on an average tweeted 610 times, while the comparable number for men is 567. In their profiles, women talk more about family and fashion, while men users engage in technology, sports and business. The favourite profile colour of women is purple (22%), followed by pink (14%). Men prefer darker shades, their least popular colour: purple.
Contrary to expectation, Twitter users are also overwhelmingly young. Seventy-four per cent falls between 15 to 25 years of age, only 6% of them are over 46 years. Most of them are in the US (51%) and United Kingdom (17%).
With nearly 3% of users, India ranks sixth in terms of Twitter users.
Many turn to Twitter to expand their spheres of influence. If you have any such ambition, good luck on that. The majority of the Twitter users have less than 50 followers and only a minuscule have followers more than 100,000. The same is true for the number of people Twitter users follow. The majority of them follow less than 50 people. More than 50% of Twitter users have an influence score of below 3 on a scale of 1 to 10.
About 12% of Twitter users have protected their accounts and most of them (64%) are women, making them more sensitive to privacy issues. A protected user with the highest number of followers calls herself is WIDIKIDIW. She is from Jakarta and has 515,290 followers. Even though Android has more market share than iOS globally, almost two-third of mobile users use Apple devices to access Twitter. The study was conducted by social analytics firm, Beevolve.