“You see, officer, I had to check my Twitter, like, duh, because my best friend just broke up with her boyfriend yesterday but then my other friend just sends me a Twitter about his rents totally going off on him and he’s majorly bummed and just then . . .”

CrowdScience just completed a study of Twitter-user habits as compared to other social media services. Since social media marketing is something you do nowadays (whether you know what you’re doing or not), you should have a fairly good idea how Tweeters uniquely interact with their social media platform.

What primarily distinguishes Tweeters from people who primarily use other social media, is that Tweeters are far more likely to use the service from out of the home, such as in their cars, at restaurants, at the movie theater, at the opera (it ain’t over until the fat lady tweets, it seems), even sitting on the john (17%). Makes sense. Tweeters use Twitter from mobile devices with far greater frequency than Hi5ers and Facebookers and MySpace Cadets.

The single most surprising (and disturbing) fact about Tweeters is that you really don’t want to be on the same freeway with them:

One-in-ten Twitter users (11%) admitted to accessing social media while driving during the preceding 30 days, compared with just 5% of other social media users. And 29% of Twitter users said they had accessed social media from cars at some point in the past, compared with 13% of non-users.

But on the serious side, the study found that only about one-fourth of users send tweets every day (27%) while around half (47%) check updates every day. Good news for people marketing through Twitter; bad news if they depend on retweets.

More relevant still was the percentage of Tweeters using mobile devices. Now, we have known through numerous polls and studies that Twitter users both send and check updates through mobile devices far more than users of other social media sites. Old news that. What stands out, however, is that fully 8% of Tweeters use the service only on mobile devices. Almost one in ten.

So if you’re tweeting to drive your followers to online resources, then those resources should be optimized for mobile devices as well as Web browsers. One in ten of your followers may not follow the bit.ly or ping.fm link anywhere else. (And if you don’t know what bit.ly and ping.fm are, check out absolutely wonderful piece on URL shorteners published to great acclaim a few months ago. Well, not really to great acclaim, but some generous soul retweeted it a couple days ago.)

Oh, and make sure you retweet this blog post.

While barreling down the freeway at 90 miles an hour.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 11:03 pm and is filed under social marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.