Twitter: Social Network or Social Bookmark Site

I read about the recent study by MarketingProfs which showed that two of the top interests cited by Twitter users are to learn new things and get information in a timely manner. It made me curious.

Twitter is generally called a social networking site. But if a top goal of Twitter users is information, I wondered if it might be more akin to social bookmarking sites. Especially since Twitter is far more of a broadcast system than an interactive system. Twitterers tend to broadcast status and other messages to the world, without expecting and usually without getting any response. That’s quite different than sites like Facebook and MySpace which allow broadcasting, but thrive on and drive interaction between users.

 There are better ways to answer this question. But to start with, I thought I’d leverage Quantcast to take a look at the demographics of social networking sites versus that of social bookmarking sites. I googled to see what the concensus was as far as recommendations for the top sites in each category. Then, for each site, I pulled the demographic data on age, gender, and parental status. I summarized the age data into “35 and over” or “under 35″. 

To more easily determine if there were clear differences between the different demographics, I graphed the data set for the social bookmarking sites and separately for the social networking sites. The results are below. (Note, this type of graph isn’t really meant to show this kind of data, but I thought it actually gave a good depiction of the range variation, so that’s what I used.)

Social Networking Sites: Gender

Social Bookmarking Sites: Gender

Social Networking Sites: Age

Social Bookmarking Sites: Age

Social Networking Sites: Parental Status

Social Bookmarking Sites: Parental Status

The graphs convey some clear differences. In general, social networking sites lean female, though not by large margins, with the exception of Tagged. Social bookmarking sites lean male, some heavily so. Social networking sites are generally far more weighted to the under 35 crowd. Facebook’s growth might be mainly in the over 35 group, but its demographic remains predominately younger. Social bookmarking sites are generally more weighted to the over 35 group, though the range is closer.

Parental status shows quite a contrast between social networking and social bookmarking sites. Social networking sites generally have a fairly even split. Social bookmarking sites on the other hand are predominantly people without kids.

So, how does Twitter fare? Below are the same graphs with Twitter added.

Based on gender, Twitter looks more like the social networking sites, as it has slightly more females than males.

Twitter looks more like a social bookmarking site from the age range distribution: somewhat more 35+ people.

Twitter looks decidedly like a social bookmarking site in its parental status distribution: heavily weighted toward the no-kids crowd.

So, just looking at the demographics, Twitter’s user profile looks a little more like a social bookmarking site to me, except for it’s slightly greater number of female users. Obviously, Twitter is used for socializing as well. In the study referenced, on a scale of 1 to 5, Twitter users averaged a rate of 3.91 agreement with the statement “I like to be connected to lots of people”. But, I think the demographics support the even bigger interest of Twitter users in getting new and timely information.