I study digital communications as part of my degree, so I have been exposed to considerable scholarship on the use of services like Facebook, Twitter and Google’s various products. An interesting side-note to all of this research always seems to be about the age and other demographic characteristics of the users of these services and internet resources in general. A 2009 report by Pew Research proclaimed Twitter users are “young”, implying (to me at least), children or teens. Not quite. The same report says: “Nearly one-in-five (19%) online adults ages 18 to 24 have ever used Twitter and its ilk, as have 20% of online adults ages 25 to 34.” These age groups are the largest on the service. That would suggest (professional) young adults are the main users.

Twitter, as conceived by media commentators, is a space where not much happens. It is a space for narscisstic teens to vent and show-off. I disagree. I suspect much of the usage of Twitter is actually by well-educated, high-earning journalists and academics, plus politicians and other celebrities. They create within the Twittersphere a kind of feedback loop that legitimates and authorises their own power base. It may well be that Twitter will reach the kind of market penetration where it can be truly called a universal service in the same manner as Google and Facebook, but until then, the Twittersphere does seem to be a niche environment packed more with self-interested media types, politicians and other celebrities and those that purport to examine it objectively (academics) than with the average net user. Indeed, stats from web-traffic analyser Alexa.com seem to confirm these suspicions. They show Twitter attracts a well-educated, slightly older user base than other websites.

What do you think? Who really uses Twitter? And are there other sites out there whose audiences are misrepresented?