Twitter Developers vs Twitter Users: Demographics

I recently initiated an informal poll of Twitter developers to determine the demographic profile of Twitter Devs. To start with, I just posted a request on the Google Group Twitter Development Talk, asking people to respond to a few questions. I didn’t use a survey because I thought I’d get a lower response rate. Hah!

In a perfect showcase of the power of the Web, one of the respondents created a Google Docs form to allow people to take the poll. Then, Doug Williams from the Twitter Platform Support team tweeted it to twitterapi. The result is 328 respondents in four days! Love the viral and cooperative nature of that.

The questions I asked were gender, age range, marital status, and parental status. My assumption (and probably yours) was that Twitter Devs would be predominantly young, male, single, and childless. But sometimes—often, actually—the data surprises you. Hence the poll. Below are some charts, via Google of course, showing the results.

Twitter Devs: Gender	Twitter Devs: Marital Status
Twitter Devs: Parent?	Twitter Devs: Age

Okay.  This time, no surprises.  Marital status is a little less skewed than I thought it would be. But otherwise, Twitter Devs are, indeed, predominately young, male, and childless.

I’m interested in this information because I’ve been looking at Twitter apps and thinking about what other applications might be useful applications. When we think about possible applications or products, we all have a tendency to think about what might be useful to us, first.  What tools might we use or the people we know (who, of course, tend to be in the same demographic as ourselves). It made me wonder, how does the demographic of Twitter developers compare with that of Twitter users?

Via Quantcast, I was able to get this data on Twitter users:

Note that I couldn’t get marital status data. Also, Quantcast measures “kids in household,” so some of the Twitter users might have grown kids. Here’s a graphical comparison of the data:

The upshot? Twitter users are far more evenly distributed in gender and age range (over 35 versus under 35). Like the developers, most Twitter users don’t have children. But by a narrower margin, meaning there are still a significant number of Twitter parents out there.

I think this information should be of particular interest to Twitter developers themselves, and especially independent or unbacked developers who are coming up with ideas for applications on their own. As noted, our ideas for applications tend to reflect our own demographic. But if you’re interested in what products/tools you can develop that might actually make some money, the first step is to understand your customer. It’s helpful to know that while a healthy share of Twitter users are like you, a good number aren’t. There may be opportunities with these other demographics that aren’t being well-addressed by the developer community.

As just one example, take Nielsen’s recent report about lower retention rates on Twitter. If that report is accurate, it begs the question of who is dropping off and why. What’s the demographic of the users who are dropping off? Is it across the board? Or is there a certain demographic that Twitter is losing? And why? What are the unfilled goals or barriers to entry for those users? Knowing the answers to those questions is likely to unveil needs that Twitter isn’t currently fulfillng, opening business opportunities for Twitter or third-party developers. Makes you think…