Talk to the World on Twitter, and It Talks Back At Ya!

Smokey Robinson follows his followers on Twitter.

If you do a Google search of  “Twitter is for old people” it returns about 146,000 results. Facebook certainly has its share of “old people” (generally defined as the over-35 set), but Twitter leads the category.  There are nearly 300 million active users of Facebook and nearly 18 million active users of Twitter. More than 60% of  both Facebook and Twitter users are over 35, but there is a slightly larger percentage of 45- to 64-year-old users on Twitter.

According to eMarketer.com (via www.briansolis.com), those between 45 and 54 years of age make up 20 percent of Facebook users;  that demographic makes up 24 percent of Twitter users. On Facebook, the 55- to 64-year-old demographic makes up 11 percent of users; on Twitter it’s 12 percent. The over-65 crowd represents 4 percent of Facebook and 3 percent of Twitter users.

If you have no idea what Twitter is, here’s the best way I can describe it after nearly three months of using it: It is a tool that enables an ordinary person to instant-message the world – and, in many cases, the world listens and responds.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, instant messaging was the way to quickly communicate with colleagues if you didn’t feel like getting up or picking up the phone. Even before we all had PCs on our desks, many companies had instant message capabilities on its multi-user platforms.

Tweeting and reading tweets is not so much about staying connected with friends and family, as is done with Facebook, but talking to those with whom you’d like to connect. For example, some of the people and things I follow on Twitter are: musicians; record labels; radio stations; music stores; news sites; newspapers; music venues; software producers; music critics; and bloggers around the world.

If you’ve looked at Twitter and concluded that it’s mostly useless chatter, you’re largely correct. But probably 20 percent of the time, you’ll learn something.

A recent study described 80 percent of all Twitter users are “meformers” - people who write all about themselves. The other 20 percent are “informers,” who relay information and/or comment on it. Even if the information supplied by the informers is ultimately promotional in nature, it can often be quite valuable.

Here’s an interesting observation from a recent New York Times article on why adults tend to like and use Twitter more than teens:

Many young people use the Web not to keep up with the issues of the day but to form and express their identities, said Andrea Forte, who studied how high school students use social media for her dissertation. (She will be an assistant professor at Drexel University in the spring.)

“Your identity on Twitter is more your ability to take an interesting conversational turn, throw an interesting bit of conversation out there. Your identity isn’t so much identified by the music you listen to and the quizzes you take,” as it is on Facebook, she said. She called Twitter “a comparatively adult kind of interaction.”

Mashable, the social media site, has a list of 100+ musicians who tweet. I have no idea who 80 percent of them are, probably because most of the people at Mashable are in their 20s and 30s – as they should be.

I recently started following Smokey Robinson (who is not on the Mashable list). He tends to follow everyone back. He likely has a software application that does an auto-follow when you place him on your “follow” list. Nothing wrong with that; it enables the artists to reach out and talk to the fans. Like nearly all public figures and celebrities on Twitter, Robinson is a “meformer,” but that’s why he’s there and why people follow him.

Twitter, which does not yet make money, is valued at $1 billion. It doesn’t seem surprising, particularly because the tool is fast becoming an essential part of the way the world communicates.

And for anyone “old” who is reading this (and who doesn’t have their reading glasses available), this is the text in the image at the top of the post:

To all the people thanking me for following them… thank you too! Really, its so nice talking to you all everyday.
3:11 PM Aug 6th from web
smokey_robinson