Twitter addicts, do not despair. You have company. A survey conducted by Market Research Company Lab 42 on how members use Twitter revealed that 42% tweet more than once a day. Lab 42 asked 500 Twitter users how they use the service, why they joined Twitter, how they determine who to follow and more. Lab 42 has compiled the information in an easy to follow infograph. You can see the infograph at the end of this article.
According to the infograph, 37% users access Twitter multiple times a day, 33% access daily, 19% few times a week, 5% few times a month and 6% rarely or never.
The graph also shows that 42% tweet more than once a day, 23% daily, 17% few times a week, 9% few times a month and 9% rarely.
64% of the users mentioned that they go on Twitter through the web version Twitter.com, 16% through mobile application and 10% through clients like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite.
As for the reasons why they are on Twitter, 33% said that they registered due to recommendation by friends, 30% were curious to see what it was all about, 17% have a lot to tweet about, 15% to follow celebrities and 5% said that they were on the micro-blogging service as a class project or requirement.
Of those surveyed, 31% said they followed brands and 66% of those admitted that they did so to avail discounts, 48% did so to participate in contests.
‘Friends Suggestions’ was the answer of 69% users when they were asked how they determined who to follow. 44% did so on recommendation from Twitter, while 31% were prompted by Promoted Tweets.
Lady Gaga is immensely popular on social networks and Twitter is no exception. 43% of the users followed her while 41% followed US President Barack Obama. In an interesting twist, 10% of those questioned did not know what a # hashtag is.
The Online Social Media has some interesting facts to share about Twitter. Started in 2006 by Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey, the site went from 0 to 200 million tweets a day in 5 years. These 200 million tweets amount to 350 billion deliveries, since the tweets are delivered to multiple users. On the launch day only 224 tweets were posted, while today the same number of tweets are made in a tenth of a second. In June, 2011 President Barack Obama started Tweeting and he also held a Town Hall meeting via Twitter.
When launched the site was known as Twittr because the Twitter.com domain was owned by a bird enthusiast and only became available to the public in July 2006. A few months later in September, the site’s name was changed to Twitter.
Twitter has also been responsible for expanding the English vocabulary to a limited but effective extent. Words like ‘Twittersphere’ and ‘Retweet’ now appear in the Oxford English Dictionary and the the word ‘follower’ is now also defined as “someone who is tracking a particular person, group, etc. on a social networking site.”
In March of this year, an auction conducted by Sharepost, an exchange for private company shares revealed that investors valued Twitter at $ 7.7 billion, more than twice the valuation the microblogging service garnered in a December 2010 funding round.
