The use of social media is still growing: a survey has revealed that 19% of internet users now say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves or see updates about others.
This is a significant increase of 8% - in previous surveys from April 2009 and December 2008 the figure was just 11%. Furthermore the report, based on data from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research International of 2,253 adults, matches the expectations of companies such as Twitter and Facebook.
According to internal documents leaked earlier this year, Twitter expects to have 25 million active users by the end of 2009, rising to 100 million by the end of 2010 - and thanks to a lot of media exposure and an army of high-profile celebrity users, this might be possible, as Twitter is looking less and less like a short-lived fad. Facebook, on the other hand, already has according to its own figures 300 million active users, producing 45m status updates a day.
The UK national newspaper Twitter accounts continued to grow as well. As media expert Malcom Cole points out, the rate has slowed down, but from October to November there was an 8.3% increase in followers to their sites.
Measuring social media use is a challenge. For example, to track the status updates for Twitter is complicated by the service being accessed through multiple platforms and devices. The fact that 10% of Twitter users account for more than 90% of tweets, as a Twitter survey of the Harvard Business Publishing revealed recently is not a great surprise: Twitter is based on an asymmetry between followers and writers and structured like a blog.
It will become even harder to measure use of social platforms in the near future, as from this year a lot of social platforms began to connect deeper and deeper with status updates fed from Twitter into Facebook and vice-versa.
But one thing is undeniable: Facebook users are getting a lot older. Its median age is now 33, up from 26 in May 2008, while the average Twitterer is still 31, a figure that has remained stable over the past year. By comparison, MySpace users' median age is 26, down from 27 in May 2008, while LinkedIn is 39, down from 40.