Some interesting analysis from Brian Solis (courtesy of data provided by Pingdom) that suggests that the average Twitter user is 39.1 years of age, most likely female, and that all of social media is dominated by persons in the 35-44 demographic.

Twitter isn’t for kids, at least not at the moment. Some 65% of all Twitter users are over the age of 35. This is good news for brands and marketers – there’s lots of disposable income there. We’ve suspected, and even known about this age-bias for some time, but it’s nice to be reminded of what increasingly appears to be a fact.

Of course, statistics can be misleading, and you certainly have to be very careful with averages. If you think about it, the ‘average person’ has one testicle and one breast. Still, Brian’s study is excellent and well worth a moment of your time.

PS. Brian’s new book, Engage, is out now, and I’ll hopefully be reviewing it very soon.

I’d like to have a look at yesterday’s Twitter traffic data from a different angle.

As I wrote in the piece, February is a short month, and this definitely accounts in part for the drop in Twitter.com’s month-by-month numbers. Furthermore, Compete’s data is very US-centric, and with Twitter.com possibly now accounting for less than 20% of all Twitter usage (different source here), it should, as I’ve consistently mentioned, be taken with a pinch.

But it still has value. Even with February being a shorter month, Twitter.com’s numbers were, at best, flat. Indeed, the website hasn’t really gained any ground with new visitors since June 2009, continuously hovering around the 22-23 million uniques mark ever since reaching that peak.

So, what about daily averages? Using Compete’s data, I’ve put together this chart.

Again, this is US-centric, but as we can see Twitter.com hasn’t seen any day-on-day growth since June. Indeed, it seems almost as if the website has become pegged against its users, like a currency. Is it consolidating for the next move upwards, or have we already seen the highs?

Read the rest of this entry

This is a monthly series that looks at visitor data for all the major social networks as calculated by Compete.com. Compete is USA-biased, and certainly in the case of Twitter the visitor numbers are distorted by the openness of Twitter’s API and the numerous Twitter software clients, but on a like-for-like basis the numerics have value and warrant investigation. Please refer to previous installments in this series for a more detailed overview.

Twitter traffic fell an eye-opening -9.63% in February, registering 21,303,254 unique visitors, and 143,947,420 overall (-5.01%).

Even accounting for a growing use in Twitter clients (which do not register at Compete), and February being a shorter month, that’s a pretty worrying statistic for Evan Williams et al, especially as they prepare their much-hyped advertising platform.

Facebook and LinkedIn also fell sizeably, down -4.32% and -8.30% respectively. Overall visits at Facebook dipped -2.51% to just over 2.8 billion.

MySpace took the biggest hit, losing -11.52% of unique visitors.

Elsewhere, Friendfeed rallied an impressive +71.79%, registering 858,703 uniques, its highest point since August 2009.

Assuming these figures are accurate (and remembering that they predominately reflect US data and visits to .coms), it’s a very mixed bag indeed, and possibly of concern for the larger social networking platforms. It’ll be interesting to see if February’s figures are an anomaly, and all sites bounce back in March, or whether we are witnessing the beginning of a more significant downtrend across all of social media.

November, 2008 – Twitter reaches 1 billion tweets.

October, 2009 – Twitter reaches 5 billion tweets.

Sometime over the next couple of days, Twitter should pass the 10 billion mark, which is an incredible accomplishment in a relatively short period of time.

This is according to data provided by Popacular.com, which tracks all tweets via an almost mesmerising GigaTweet counter.

Last month, we reported how Twitter was now averaging close to 50 million tweets per day. GigaTweet has charts for that, too.

As well as per hour.

In case you’re wondering how they work this out, all tweets are conveniently tagged with their number, which is contained in the URL.

For example, this tweet is number 9,887,809,135.

Who will get tweet 10 billion? Just how many of these tweets are spam or ‘pointless babble’? And how long would it take you to read them all?

More importantly, shouldn’t Twitter really give out some kind of prize?

(Hat tip to Diana Adams, her friend @cheth and Mashable.)

An interesting update over on the official Twitter blog, where analytics lead Kevin Weil looks at the growth of the network over the past three years in terms of numbers of tweets per day.

Kevin notes that all accounts identified as spam have been removed from this data, which makes the results even more impressive.

On a year-by-year basis, Kevin notes that Twitter has grown from just 5,000 tweets per day in 2007, to 35 million in 2009, and 50 million as of January this year.

Twitter has a habit of flat-lining pretty quickly after stellar growth, but given we’ve already seen a 43% rise in daily tweets in just a couple of months, and 200% since July, it doesn’t seem too fantastical to set a target of 100 million tweets per day before the end of the year. That’s 1,200 per second, if you’re counting.

Perhaps less impressively – assuming my estimations of 25 million active and bonafide users are accurate – that’s just four per profile, per day. Which equates to only two per day, at the current levels. If the active user numbers are as high as 75 million as some have suggested, that would mean just 1.33 tweets per day per person to hit the magic hundred. Given I do forty or so per day myself, I’m pretty sure that between us we can cope, even if a bunch of you continue taking a siesta.

Of course, if Twitter would actually release the active user data, that would make crunching these numbers just that little bit easier. All this guesswork is getting just a wee bit tiresome.