How To Split An Atom

I am certainly not an analyst, but I do enjoy playing one. Today’s most interesting news so far is that somehow Twitter, that microblogging application that only those of us who bandy about words like “social media,” care about is being used by 6% of U.S. adult Internet users. Forrester Research put out these statistics, and not too surprisingly, these numbers might be just a little bit high.

Twitter Stats

Total Twitter Usage (September 2007, Compete ): 450,000 Uniques

U.S. Twitter Users (September 2007, Alexa): 36.5% of Total Twitter Total (yes, I know Alexa is about as accurate as trying to use a Snow Globe to predict the weather).

[Derived] Approximate U.S. Twitter Users: 164,000 Unique users

World Internet Usage Statistics

Total U.S. Internet Usage (August 2007, Nielsen//NetRatings ): 210,575,287 (90% of population)

Total U.S Adults Ages 18-65 (July 2006, U.S. Census): approximately 201,000,000

Internet Usage Statistics For U.S. Adults 18+ (Pew Internet Project): 90%

[Derived] Approximate Internet Usage For Adults 18-65: 180,000,000

Web 2.0 Roundup

Now, if 180,000,000 U.S. Adults use the Internet and Twitter has managed to grab about 164,000 per month, that means that the saturation stands at around .0009%. Some of my math might be a little off and the statistics I have drawn my data from certainly are not perfect, but we are dealing in orders of magnitude here.

The conclusion is that in all likelihood the Forrester Report is suffering from a significant bias, which might be explained by this line from the report, “…The sample was drawn from members of MarketTools’ online panel, and respondents were motivated by a sweepstakes drawing. The sample provided by MarketTools is not a random sample. While individuals have been randomly sampled from MarketTools’ panel for this particular survey, they have previously chosen to take part in the MarketTools online panel.”

If anyone has numbers to refute mine, I would be happy to see them.

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