I came across this interesting chart from Michael Brito this morning that shows the demographic breakdown of Twitter users by age.

Interestingly the fastest growing segment on Twitter (other than bots) is among people 24 and younger accelerated faster than older folks in 2009, according to comScore.

Unlike most social networks, Twitter started out being more popular with adults, before it caught on with younger users. Last year that changed as celebrity tweets caught on, and mainstream media started talking about the service more.

At the end of 2009, more than 30% of Twitter’s visitors were under 25, this chart suggests, up from about 20% of its visitors at the end of 2008.

As you can see from the chart above, more than 30% of Twitter’s visitors were under 25 up from about 20% of its visitors at the end of 2008; thank you in part to celebrity adoption and the mainstream media mentioning Twitter over

If your target demographic is college students, there is no better way to reach this group that through Facebook.

According to the “American College Students Survey” Facebook is not only the overwhelming favorite social networking site (SNS) among college students; it may rapidly become the only SNS that matters, according to research by Anderson Analytics.

Among seven leading social networking sites ranked by college students in the Anderson Analytics 2009-2010 GenX2Z American College Student Survey conducted this fall, Facebook was viewed as “cool” by a whopping 82% of males and 90% of females. All other SNS’ were deemed “lame” by significant percentages of both male and female collegiate users. In particular, MySpace–the granddaddy of SNS’–was considered “lame” by the largest portion of college students (31%).

This Facebook trend can also been when US college students were asked to name their favorite site. More than one-quarter of them rated Facebook as their favorite Website of all. That was nearly a 12-point increase over last year, and put Facebook more than 20 points ahead of second-most-popular Google.

I was interested to see that Hulu broke into the top 10 sites for college students. I have written recently that I believe that the future of social media is in video and Anderson’s survey results agree with this.

Anderson predicts Facebook will also eventually make greater use of streaming media, specifically TV shows and movies. “Seventy percent of college students in our survey said they had watched either an entire television episode or full-length movie online,” said Anderson. “And for the first time since we started conducting the study in 2005, a streaming media website–Hulu.com–ranked among students’ ten most popular websites.”

“There is already a Hulu widget on Facebook, and there are also personal pages for popular television characters,” he said. “For example, Family Guy topped the list of favorite TV shows among college-aged males in our survey, and more than 800,000 users have joined the fan page for the show’s character ‘Brian the dog’. It’s a natural fit.”

A new report from LinkedIn Research Network and Harris Interactive paints a worrisome picture for Twitter. While the research found that 83% of advertisers were familiar with Twitter (and you have to question who the other 17% are!), only 8% of advertisers and consumers think it is a “very effective” promotion tool.

In addition to the 8% of advertisers who said Twitter was very effective for promotion, 50% said it was somewhat effective. More than three in 10 (34%) said it was not very effective and 8% felt it was not effective at all.

Among consumers the numbers are just as bleak. Only 8% of consumers said that Twiiter was an effective platform for promoting products and ideas,  42% believed it to be somewhat effective, 31% said it was not very effective and 19% felt it was not at all effective.

Twitter has got a lot of mainstream media attention in the last year, but success stories from companies who are using Twitter to increase sales are few and far between.

I believe that this is because users view Twitter as a place to keep in touch with friends, which I blogged about last week, and not a site to be introduced to new products or services.

Until this consumer expectation changes, Twitter cannot be be considered an effective marketing tool.

A common mistake that many advertisers make is that they think that all social networks are the same. That the ad campaign they have for Facebook will work on MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn.

The problem with that approach is that social networkers utilize these sites in different ways depending on their age. So one blanket campaign across the different networks is not effective.

For example, according to Anderson Analytics, Generation Z (13-to-14-year-old) social network users were more likely to use MySpace than Facebook. Only 9% of them used Twitter and none used LinkedIn.

If you want to target Generation Y users, then usage is a little different. Three-quarters of 15-to-29-year-olds used MySpace, 65% used Facebook, 14% used Twitter and 9% used LinkedIn.

For Generation X users (30-to-44-year-olds) and baby boomers (44-to-65-year-olds), they are connected on LinkedIn more than any demographic.

Nine in 10 older social network users, which Anderson Analytics called the WWII generation, use Facebook but only 17% of these users tweet.

Last week I blogged about the “Consumer Internet Barometer” study and what it showed Social Networks Demographics.

Within the same report there was some very interesting data about Twitter users and why they use that social network site. Almost half of all users (41.6%) are using Twitter for that purpose while 29.1% used it to update their status, 25.8% to find news and stay updated, 21.7% for work purposes and 9.4% for research.

If so many people are using Twitter (and Facebook to some extent) to keep in contact with friends and family, that might explain why so many companies are struggling to make money using Twitter.

There is a new study out called the “Consumer Internet Barometer” that has some very interesting insights about Twitter, Facebook and who uses social networks. Throughout the week I will be highlighting several of the points that the Consumer Internet Barometer found.

One interesting demographic point was that nearly one-half of females visited social networking sites, compared with 37.6% of men. And that more than 70% of Internet users under age 35 browsed social networks.

That percentage decreased as users got older, with only 43.1% of those ages 35 to 54 and 18.9% of users ages 55 and older visiting social networks. But what is attractive to advertisiers is the huge jump in social network traffic across all age groups in the last 12 months.

Frequency of Use

Interestingly, the report showed that over 50% of users visited social network sites at least once per day. And people are logging into social networks via office computers, home computers and mobile devices, showing how strong the connection to the social networks are.

The most popular social networking sites came as no surprise: Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter, in that order.

More bad news for MySpace as Facebook finally passed it last month to become the most popular US social networking site. According to comScore, Facebook totaled 70,278,000 unique visitors, up 97% from May 2008 to May 2009. MySpace audience shrank 5% over the same timeframe, falling to 70,255,000 unique visitors.

Obviously Twitter has seen some tremendous growth in the last 12 months, but I find it interesting that the 5th and 6th biggest social networking sites are MyLife.com and Windows Live Profile! Also, Bebo (an AOL purchase) is slowly making inroads into the U.S. market I would expect to see them continue to grow market share.

One area that MySpace continues to dominate Facebook is in advertising, not withstanding the recent layoffs at MySpace.

In April, MySpace visitors viewed 31.8 million ads, accounting for almost 47% of the total social network advertising space. Facebook was second, serving nearly 25 million ads and making up about 37% of the sector. In third place surprisingly was Tagged, which served 2.4 million ads, or 3.6% of publisher views.

MySpace is doing a good job converting those ad impressions in revenue as they are predicted to earn $495 million in 2009, more than double Facebook’s projected income.

eMarketer expects that the revenue gap will likely close in 2009-2010. MySpace entered into an advertising agreement with Google in 2006 that would pay the social network roughly $300 million a year, ending in June 2010. But TechCrunch reported that a new deal between Google and MySpace would be worth only $50 million to $75 million yearly, punching a big hole in the social network’s revenues.

“Facebook is becoming the go-to social networking site for marketers,” said eMarketer senior analyst Debra Aho Williamson. “While MySpace still has a huge quantity of visitors, they are becoming less relevant for advertisers.”

A couple of months ago I wrote about the Graying of Facebook and how that more than 50% of Facebook’s users in the U.S. are over 35; the single biggest age demographic in the U.S. on Facebook is now between 35 and 44, and that Facebook’s fastest growing demo is 55-plus.

So I was shocked to see an article in MediaPost that referenced some data from Insidefacebook.com that said that during April and May, the number of U.S. Facebook users over 55 actually dropped by 650,000 after increasing by 1.6 million the prior two months.

In the last two months Facebook rolled out a new design, featuring more frequent updates in users news feeds and that might have resulted in fewer over 55 users using Facebook surmised Inside Facebook editor Justin Smith

“Maybe older users are still getting acclimated to how to use Facebook’s real-time stream to share information with friends and family,”

InsideFacebook has some great demographic data on Facebook users split by age group and gender. If you are marketing on Facebook, you need to be aware of any changes in Facebook demographics.

Interesting data from TV Week  that shows that while YouTube remains the No. 1 online video site, Hulu continues to see exponential growth.

Hulu is the fastest-growing site among Nielsen Online’s top 10 video brand sites, which include YouTube, Yahoo!, Fox Interactive Media, Nickelodeon Kids & Family Network, MSN/Windows Live, ABC.com, MTV Networks Music and Turner Sports & Entertainment Digital.

YouTube delivered 5.5 billion total streams in April, while Hulu increased 490% from 63.2 million streams in April 2008 to hit 373.3 million in April ’09.

Jon Gibs, vice president of media and analytics for Nielsen Online, attributed Hulu’s growth to “a good interface and excellent, aggressive marketing campaign.”

“Historically, short-form, clip-length video has ruled streaming on the Web—as demonstrated by YouTube’s top spot month after month,” Mr. Gibbs added. “Hulu, along with pure-play providers like Veoh and the TV networks, have spent the past two years trying to convince consumers that the Internet can be a good place to watch full-length programming as well. April’s strong showings of Hulu, Fox and ABC suggest that consumers are beginning to listen.”

Nielsen’s report also found that people age 35-49 was the fastest-growing demographic for time spent viewing during April. Among that demographic, the top five sites were YouTube, Hulu, ABC.com, NBC.com and the CNN Digital network. Unique viewers age 35-49 represented 30% of total Hulu viewers in April.

“Despite what many believe, it is not the young, tech-savvy, early adopters who are attracted to long-form video,” Mr. Gibs said in a statement. “In fact, we see that it is the older crowd, viewers 35-plus, who gravitate toward long-form video, with sites like Hulu acting as a perfect example of this. Advertisers are paying attention,” Mr. Gibs added. “They see long-form video sites like Hulu as a safe bet for online advertising, recognizing that their key audiences are there and more willing to sit through an online advertisement while watching a favorite show, much as they do with the TV.”

Have you started to use Hulu instead of YouTube to catch up on some shows that you missed?

As I have written about many times this year, twitter is the incredible hot at the moment. Everyone from your local coffee shop to Oprah is on Twitter and Twitter’s growth is skyrocketing.

eMarketer estimates there will be over 12 million Twitter users in the US in 2009, slightly more than twice last year’s number.

But figures released by Nielsen Online suggest that Twitter’s retention rate is only 40%. In other words, as David Martin wrote on the Nielsen blog:

“Currently, more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent. For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention.”

With any new technology you have to expect that people will sign up to find out what all the buzz is about and then get bored after a period of time and stop using the service.

What is interesting is that it is not the 18-to-24-year-olds, the traditional social media early adopters, that are driving Twitter growth—25-to-54-year-olds are.

Specifically, 45-to-54-year-olds were 36% more likely than average to visit Twitter, making them the highest-indexing age group, and 25-to-34-year-olds were 30% more likely to visit.

“The skew towards older visitors, although perhaps initially surprising for a social media site, actually makes more sense than you might think at first,” wrote Sarah Radwanick on a comScore blog. “With so many businesses using Twitter, along with the first generations of Internet users ‘growing up’ and comfortable with technology, this is a sign that the traditional early adopter model might need to be revisited.”

Several assumptions might need to be revisited. There is no question, Twitter is not developing in the same way as its social networking predecessors, such as MySpace and Facebook. The question is: Will the Twitter fad fade, or is a powerfully simple networking tool only now beginning to find its unique audience? Only time will tell…