Shel Israel interviews Twitter’s co-founders and shares some interesting insights into how people are using the service. Twitter can be described as, “a social utility which connects with people who they already know, or are interested in”.
Of all the emerging tools of social media, Twitter is the most conversational. The mobile SMS service allows people to chat in compact bite sized 140-character blocks. Some use it 20-30 times or more per day and some even have thousands of followers. But the average user only posts three times a day and chats only with a few friends.
Some businesses are also using Twitter too. For example, employees are using Twitter to communicate and share their information. Other businesses, are using the service to keep in touch with their customers, or using it for customer support.
Interestingly, Twitter’s global traffic can be broken down into four segments:
Web, SMS, Instant Messaging (IM) and API usage
Usage of Twitter’s API is 20 times than that of the Twitter.com web service.
The pie chart below, show’s Twitter’s International Web traffic usage.
NB. Remember this is just web traffic. It doesn’t include any of the other popular ways that people use Twitter. For example, this figure does not include: m.twitter.com, and API applications such as Twhirl and Twitterrific.
Interestingly, 60% of Twitter users are non US users and of that 39% are Japanese! Spain and the UK are also strong Twitter users. Good Stuff!
Click on the image to see a larger pie chart
