We’re hearing a lot about the explosion of Twitter into mainstream culture these days. The site’s traffic has grown more than 700 percent worldwide in the past year. Some new data suggests the majority of Twitter’s users, though, aren’t in the demographic you might expect.
Users 18 to 24 years old, though typically portrayed as being among the “most connected” people, make up one of the lowest chunks of Twitter’s userbase, according to an analysis published by ComScore this week. It’s the 45 to 54 age group that takes up the biggest piece of the pie, ComScore finds, followed by the 25 to 34 group.
What explains the breakdown, then? ComScore points to the increasingly common corporate uses for social technology.
“With so many businesses using Twitter, along with the first generations of Internet users ‘growing up’ and comfortable with technology, this is a sign that the traditional early adopter model might need to be revisited,” says ComScore’s Sarah Radwanick.
“Not only teenagers and college students can be counted among the ‘technologically inclined,’ which means that trends are much more prone to take off in older age segments than they used to,” she contends.
