Study: Twitter users skew older

With active users increasing by 900 percent in a year, it’s clear that Twitter isn’t going anywhere.

Two venture capital firms, Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital, funneled $35 million into the popular micro-blogging site, citing Twitter’s explosive growth.

Despite its popularity, are you still wondering whether Twitter is a waste of time or if it could be useful to you or your company? A new Pew Research Center report should help — it details who, exactly, uses Twitter or updates their status on other social networking sites.

The study, “Twitterpated: Mobile Americans Increasingly Take to Tweeting,” found that 11 percent of online American adults used Twitter or another micro-blogging service in December 2008, compared to 9 percent in November.

Although the largest age groups using Twitter or similar services are on the younger side — 19 percent of online 18- to 24-year-olds, and 20 percent of 25- to 31-year-olds — the median age of a Twitter user is 31. That’s several years older than the median age for Facebook and MySpace users: 26 and 27, respectively.

College students haven’t caught on