So, off the back of feedback on my recent post on the demographic of LinkedIn STATS, I thought I might let you in on one of our little secrets here at Thinktank Media.
Most people think that the Twitter audience is predominately female. Indeed in the US, where most of our market research comes from, it is female dominated. This is contrary to popular belief. Here in Australia the numbers are unusual.
Source: Google Ad Planner – Viewed 30th April, 2010.
Twitter users in Australia are 66% Male.
Twitter users in America are 60% Female.
4 Keys:
- This is an exceptionally ugly looking graph.
- These are remarkable differences and a staggering insight into the differences in culture.
- Figures like this should dictate how you treat different social media channels.
- This figures change very regularly, so they will be outdated almost the month this post is uploaded.
There were also major difference is the dominant age groups. The United States most active group on social media is 35-44 years olds, whereas here it is the 45-55 year olds at 32%.
The United Kingdom is behind us but ahead of the USA on 58% males. Japan is just slightly behind us on 62% males.
I would love to hear your theories and interpretations on why you think it is this way here in OZ in the comments section below.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Maybe this simply means that Australian males can work and Twitter at the same time.
Or Australian males get bored more easily and seek some light relief with a bit of twittering on the side.
Maybe Australian men are attracted by the 140 word limit and Australian women are deterred by it.
Maybe Australian men have simply picked up on the utility of Twitter earlier—-and the women will catch up!
Do you have any data on how reliable google’s information is? People don’t list their gender in their profiles so I’m curious.
Hi Laura – thx for stopping by
You certainly need to use a number of sources to accurately measure this stuff. However as always in my line of work Australian Stats are always hard to find. I did compare Google Ad Planner US results against the touted Quantcast statistics for the US and they were 5% out. I would naturally anticipate these inaccuracies anyway how.
The source is always problematic and getting accurate data is always problematic. There just appears to be a problem in social media type analysis in that people take questionable data sets and treat them as gospel. It’s the latter part that is annoying. (And even more annoying when you see people getting paid $$$ for data that can’t be replicated.) It wasn’t intended as a criticism of your analysis. More of a statement of general discontent with trying to figure out how to get more trust worthy data.
I’d really love to see additional Australian data, especially in print and citable for academic work.
Yeah I feel your pain Laura.
I was having this conversation about this the other day. There is always missing pieces in the puzzle. It took me a few years to work out that it is the drawing of meaning from what is available that counts.
chrs
@nataliegiddings