posted her first tweet live on her TV show, assisted by Twitter cofounder Evan Williams), Twitter's growth chart has changed from a gentle climb into a hockey stick, a phenomenal accomplishment.
There is another fact about Twitter that's particularly interesting, though: It's massively underused.
The average Twitterer has 126 followers and has sent out fewer than 300 tweets across the life of his or her account. Not only that, but 30 to 40 percent of Twitter accounts are also dormant, never having posted a single tweet.
To put a few numbers here, Joel currently has 81,119 followers and follows 1,372 people, and Dave has 12,574 followers and follows 932 people. And to put things in perspective, when Joel was asked to write the first edition of Twitter Power back in 2009, he had only 5,000 followers, and not a single person had yet come close to having 1 million followers.
Twitter's growth has turned it into a massive marketing opportunity.
All of these figures just scratch the surface of the popularity of social media, though. YouTube attracts more than 1 billion unique visitors each month. Visitors watch more than 6 billion hours of video content each month. Oh, and 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Every minute!
Throw in the countless millions of blogs and social networks, such as Pinterest, Instagram, Google Plus, and Reddit, and it becomes pretty clear that social media is a massive phenomenon that's changed the way all of us create and use content – and the way that businesses use that content and their distribution channels, too.
So we can see that social media sites and users can be big. Really, really big. But so what? There are lots of people in the telephone book, and that's very big, too. Being big doesn't make it a particularly useful marketing tool.
Social media sites don't just list people, though, and they don't just list any old people.
Each site lists a very special group of people.
At first glance, that might seem a little strange. Whether you're browsing through Facebook, Pinterest, Flickr, or Twitter, you're going to see small pictures of people, short messages among them, and profiles in which those people share things about themselves, such as where they work, where they're from, and what they do in their spare time.
Look a little closer, though, and you'll start to notice differences because although the sites may seem similar, in fact, each site has its own unique feel and its own unique demographic.
Because Facebook started at Harvard University, for example (it had signed up half the undergraduate population within a month of going live), and because it was initially restricted to university students, it continues to have a higher percentage of well-educated members than of the general population.
Clearly, that suggests many of Facebook's users are also college students – a fantastic market for companies hoping to acquire buyers and fans, then turn them into invaluable lifetime customers and evangelists.
By comparison, tracking Twitter's demographics isn't easy. Although some people have had fun following the frequency with which certain wealth-related terms (such as well-to-do neighborhoods) turn up, there's no easy way to conduct a demographic survey of the site's users. Hitwise, an Internet monitoring service, did, however, manage to produce some very interesting, and some very impressive, results.
Figure 1.1 shows some Twitter stats from the company.
Figure 1.1 Now you know how much coffee they consume at Twitter's headquarters!
Pew Internet reports that as of January 2014, 18 percent of online adults use Twitter, broken down into 17 percent of online adult males and 18 percent of online women, with 16 percent of white, 29 percent of African American, and 16 percent of Hispanic ethnicities represented. Twitter also biases younger: 31 percent of users are 18- to 29-year-olds, 19 percent are 30 to 49, and less than 10 percent are older than 50.
Most fascinating of all, though, 18 percent of Twitter users have completed some college, and another 18 percent have an undergrad or graduate degree. When you consider earnings, the greatest percentage of online users who are on Twitter are those who earn $75,000 or more. That's a lot of dough!
Although a number of twentysomethings might have joined Twitter out of curiosity, it is clear that the site isn't just used by young people as an alternative to text messaging and Facebook chats. Twitter has a large following among older, professional audiences, and a full quarter of Twitter's users are high earners, a valuable piece of information that makes the service a must for any serious marketer.
We can see that social media sites aren't just attracting kids looking for places to chat with their friends and find out where to load up on free music downloads. They're also attracting smart, educated people with money to burn.
They're attracting experts, too.
You can see this most clearly on specialist sites, such as Flickr, a photo-sharing service. Although Flickr too isn't very forthcoming about its demographic details, spend any time at all on the site, and you can't help but notice the number of professional photographers who use it.
Part of the site's appeal isn't just the pictures; enthusiasts also can pick up advice from experts who are working in their field and are ready to share the benefits of their experience.
Whatever site we look at, there's no question at this point in the evolution of the Internet that social media sites attract huge numbers of people. We can see too that many of those people are highly educated, are well paid, and are experts in their fields.
You should be realizing that social media offers a gigantic opportunity for business owners to promote their products to exactly the sort of market they want to reach, whether it's predominantly male, female, rich, poor, geographically based, or of a specific ethnic group.
One of the reasons that social media has proved to be so popular is that it's available in all sorts of different forms. Although the networking sites with their tens of millions of members might be the most familiar, there are actually all sorts of different ways of creating and sharing social media content.
Blogs
Yes, blogs are a form of social media, too. They're written by people on every topic you can imagine. (See Figure 1.2.) And only a tiny fraction of them are produced by professionals, even though all have the potential to generate revenue. Figure 1.2 is Joel's blog.
Figure 1.2 Joel's blog's home page at JoelComm.com. He writes it; you read it and comment on it. And yes, Comm is his real last name!
Meanwhile, Dave has three blogs. Really! Check out GoFatherhood.com to learn about his life as a dad, visit DaveOnFilm.com to read his film reviews, and then hang out at AskDaveTaylor.com to read his daily tech questions and answers and product reviews!
What really makes blogging part of social media is that it has incredibly minimal costs associated with getting started and running your site. Sure, if you want to have your own domain name and place the blog on your own server, you might have to pay a small
