Twitter Users And Receptivity – Socialmedicaexplorer.com
I spotted an interesting data point in the recent report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, entitled “The Social Side Of The Internet.” The basic findings of the report – that Internet users are more social – may perhaps come as no surprise, but I love to look for little “spicy meatballs” in data like these – the interesting, dramatic disparities that you mightnot have guessed. Here’s one: Twitter users arefar more likely to have discovered groups on the Internet, and spent more time on group activities, than are users of social networking sites in general, as the following table illustrates:
There are some enormous disparities here – while 32% of the users of social networking sites have discovered groups to join on the Internet, 47% of Twitter users specifically have done so. Similarly, Twitter users are over 50% more likely to say that they spend more time on group activities because of the Internet than are the “garden variety” social networkers.
Data like these do not reflect causal relationships, of course – merely correlations. In the case of Twitter, which is still a growing and developing organism thathas yet to cross the chasm to mainstream adoption, these findings certainly don’t posit that Twitter itself has enabled group membership. Rather, it suggests that Twitter users – a small subset of overall social networking users – are morereceptive to joining groups. In other words, Twitter does not encourage or necessarily even facilitate group behavior; instead, it rather neatly aggregates humans who are already predisposed to joining groups in the first place.
Continues @http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com
