Twitter penetration low, should we stop Tweeting?

We hear about Twitter and Facebook very often these days. One would think ‘every’ internet user is on social media, at least in the US. How untrue.

According to a new survey from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project (via Gigaom) just 8 percent of American Internet users are on Twitter. Other finds,

• Twitter launched on July 15, 2006
• Twitter remains a niche service in the U.S
• 74 percent of Americans currently use the Internet. So just 6% of Americans are on Twitter
• Among 18-29 year olds, 14 percent use Twitter, compared to 7 percent of 30-49-year-olds
• More women use Twitter compared to men.
• Racial pie: 18% Hispanics, 13% African Americans, 5% whites
• Currently Twitter has 175 m users from across the world, daily sign ups of 370,000
• Majority of Twitter users, 65%, are from outside the U.S.
• 36 percent of Twitter users check for new posts on a daily basis (the rest in my opinion can be ignored)
• Characteristics of Tweets: 72% said they tweet about personal life.

Country wise breakdown of Twitter users (Oct 2009),

• USA : 50.88%
• Brazil : 8.79%
• UK : 7.20%
• Canada : 4.35%
• Germany : 2.49%
• Indonesia : 2.41%
• Australia : 2.39%
• Netherlands : 1.32%
• India : 1.27%
• Japan : 1.22%

India’s population is about 1.2 billion, of which only 60-70 million have access to internet. According to the above report, India has about 2.5 million Twitter users. Indonesia has about 5.5 million Twitter users, that speaks about their internet penetration.

Celebrities in India have been reasonably active on Twitter, only a handful though. Overall, the user base may not be as big as every one envisaged, but hey, I would still want to have those 2.5 million users as my followers.