Research out by Pew shows that when it comes to the major US hard news story of 2012, the Presidential election, voters prefer tried and tested news sources.

Only one in twenty (6%) Americans hears about the campaign from Facebook, and while 20% get election news from online news apps or websites, 36% get it from cable TV.Similarly, 41% of Twitter users ‘regularly’ or ‘sometimes’ get election news on Twitter, compared to 40% who never do.

Two observations about this study:

Pew headlines it by saying “Twitter, Facebook play very modest roles.”

I would add the words “so far.”   Pew’s research also shows that younger age groups who are most likely to get news from social media, have so far been turned off by the campaign

Secondly, we’ve yet to have the set piece events of the election, the live Presidential debates.   The recent US Superbowl showed how social media and live TV now goes hand in hand with 10,000 tweets a second being sent in the closing minutes.

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This comes from charity donations site JustGiving (via The Telegraph) using their own data.    However, JustGiving also shows that the vast majority of donations (97%) were made through Facebook.

That’s probably more an indication of how JustGiving works, the fact that they have apps they want to push (another stat – apps drive more donations) and that Facebook appears to be the default for charities.

However the JustGiving research does show that Twitter is a potentially fruitful area that charities should consider.

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In fact, separate research from analytics firm Crowd Science does show that liking a brand Facebook page is the exception and not the norm.   ‘Only’ 9% of Facebook users have liked a brand page.  And not surprisingly, the older the user, the less likely they are to give up a like.

Of course, a pool of 1/10 Facebook users is still significant given the ’1-9-90′ school of thought that you need to target the 9% of people who actively comment and share.

So how do you get that 9% to actually like your page.   The most effective routes are also the obvious ones.   Crowd Science’s infographic shows that many Facebook users simply want to show support for a brand, while good and interesting content works well too.

As a result, placing prompts for visitors to like your Facebook page on other social properties / your website makes sense.   As does a widget or preview bar displaying the type of content they might expect to see.

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Hitwise now has the latest UK stats, and visits to Twitter keep on growing.   According to analyst Robin Goad, on Saturday, Twitter accounted for 1 in 184 UK Internet visits online.

The chart above pretty much says it all:   Previously there have been questions about the high level of Twitter churn with various estimates showing that 80%+ of accounts might be dormant.   This however will answer the question I used to hear quite a lot: “yes but my mum in Milton Keynes doesn’t use it.”  (or variations of that)

My answer at the time was usually – she might not use it, but the people who she reads about or watches / listens to do.

Now that answer can be changed again – she might not, but having had Twitter splashed on the front pages of the UK tabloids, she will almost certainly now have some kind of awareness of it.   Indeed, Robin’s post shows that Twitter visitors are becoming more mainstream and are moving closer to the UK population average.

Recently Comscore estimated that Twitter penetration was 12.9% of the UK Internet population.   It will be interesting to see how this changes in light of what has been happening over the past two weeks.

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Last year RJ Metrics figured out that Twitter’s rate of churn was 83% – or rather this was the % of accounts that had seen no activity for a month, a pretty good indicator for lack of interest.

Silicon Alley Insider similarly decided to look at Twitter’s “real” user base, by looking at its API.  It found that only 10% of Twitter users follow more than 50 people, while 38 million follow 16 – probably the minimum threshold at which you can make any real sense or use of the micro-blogging service.

From that you could draw the conclusion that Twitter’s actual user base is anywhere between 20-40 million (most likely at the lower end of that).

That does have the ring of truth about it, when you consider that Twitter’s penetration in the US and UK hovers around 12% and 8% of the Internet population respectively according to Comscore and Pew – this compares to 70% for Facebook.

Do these figures matter?  In one sense not really – those of us who are very active on Twitter always knew that the network’s real and published size are not one and the same.    And, Twitter is simply not a mass market service, rather its useful for targeting so-called influencers as the network over indexes with journalists and bloggers who will take what they read and amplify it on other media.

Also its worth noting the evidence that Twitter is starting to perform significantly better in emerging markets.  Last Summer Comscore found that Twitter grew 305% in Latin America compared to 22% in North America.

And so, while Twitter penetration is 8% in the US, it is over 20% in both Brazil and Venezuela.

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The other day fellow Rabbit Kate put up a post on the Rabbit site congratulating sandwich chain Pret a Manger on how they responded to a twitter complaint she made.

Kate highlighted the speed of the response, the sincerity of it and the evident internal coordination between whoever was handling their social media feeds and the rest of the company.

Unfortunately not all companies are that progressive, as I saw 1st hand the other day with giant US carrier United Airlines.

If you take a United flight chances are your napkin will have a message printed on it, inviting you to follow them on Twitter.   But don’t expect any kind of speedy response if you elect to talk to them rather than the other way around.   When I was stuck at Washington’s Dulles Airport the other night after our plane had a fault I tweeted them out several times (the last time that I was writing a blog post).

Among other things I was curious to see what would happen as we have travel clients ourselves at Rabbit.

The answer was nothing.

OK it was 7pm and not every brand has the resources to run an out of hours account, but the merger with Continental will make it into the world’s largest airline and (given different time zones) a 24 hour operation.

But they didn’t reply the next day either.   In fact, with 167k followers, United has sent out four tweets in a week.   Compare that to JetBlue and Virgin America, held up as the benchmark for effective use of social media among airlines – JetBlue for example has responded to customers 16x in 24 hours.

Between printing the Twitter ID on promotional literature, running the feed and making it part of United’s comms strategy something has obviously gone wrong.   Not everyone has the means or inclination to run an account properly, but if you are advertising it to tens of thousands of people every day, it’s definitely important that you’ve moved beyond seeing it as purely a piece of broadcast media

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This is according to Canadian research company Sysomos, which found that 92.4% of re-tweets happen within the first hour of the original tweet being posted.

Sysomos also found that 29% of tweets generate some kind of reaction, either a reply (23%) or retweet (6%).   While you could turn that into a headline of ’71% of tweets get ignored’ (and here’s the story from Mashable saying exactly that), I actually think a rate 3/10 tweets eliciting some kind of response is quite high – this is especially when you consider that a lot of tweets are simply personal musings that wouldn’t warrant any kind of reaction.

According to Sysomos, 85% of replies are ‘one level’ deep, 10.7% go down two levels (ie have two ripples of responses) and 1.53% are three levels deep.   Again, you can interpret this statistic in a number of different ways.   Sysomos says that “only” 1.53% of tweets go down three levels.   I look it like this:

There are nearly 100 million tweets a day (image from Twitter above).   So, every single day 29 million tweets elicit some kind of response.

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Conducted among US Internet consumers, the study showed that 27% of subscribers to an email newsletter were more likely to purchase from a brand while 37% of Twittewr users were.

Meanwhile less than one in five Facebook brand fans (17%) said they were more likely to buy – a surprise considering that 49% disagreed with that statement (which is obviously not the same as saying that they were less likely to make a purchase).

Exact Target has produced a handy chart showing that while Twitter has the lowest reach, it provides the greatest opportunities for customer acquisition.   However, it’s email subscribers who are the most interested in getting discounts, promotions or freebies.

Finally, it’s worth looking at who conducted the survey.

Exact Target is an email marketing system, and Co Tweet is a Twitter management tool…no Facebook app developers involved in the study then.   I’m not suggesting the data is wrong.

A lot of it is definitely interesting, and personally I am a big Twitter fan, but you do wonder if some of the questions were skewed to produce a certain result.

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In summary Pew Research says that almost half (47%) of 50-64 year olds use social networks use social networks, while a quarter (26%) of the over 65s do so – this compares to 86% of the under 30s.    In other words the social media age barrier has steadily been moving from people in their 30s two years ago, to people in their 40s in 2008/9, to Web users in their 50s now.

When it comes to daily social network use, 20% of 50-64 year olds do so, along with 13% of the over 65%.

Pew says that older Internet surfers are still more comfortable with what you might call traditional past times such as emailing or reading the news.   And 20% of 50-64 year olds who use social media every day is still very much a minority.  But – it’s worth noting that a year ago, that figure was only 10%, so the number of habitual 50 something social media users has doubled in the twelve months.

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A common answer to ‘why Twitter, it’s not a mass market tool?’, is ‘because the people who do use it matter.’ The influence over numbers argument.

That’s backed up by an ExactTarget study, reproduced in emarketer. US Twitter users in April 2010 were far more likely than general Internet users to post to forums (75% vs 25%), blog (72% vs 14%), comment on blogs (70% vs 23%) and post ratings / reviews (61% vs 20%).

In other words, the 14 million odd people who regularly go on Twitter (as opposed to the 95 million that have signed up), are already active in social media, know how to make things happen and to create noise – good or bad – online, and take conversations elsewhere, be that to blogs, forums, other social networks, or even the mainstream media.

As Morgan Stewart of ExactTarget puts it, “What happens on Twitter doesn’t stay on Twitter. While the number of active Twitter users is less than Facebook or email, the concentration of highly engaged and influential content creators is unrivaled—it’s become the gathering place for content creators whose influence spills over into every other corner of the internet.”

ExactTarget also asked Twitter users why they followed brands. The biggest reason was for informational purposes, with updates on future brands (38%) and keeping informed about the company (32%) being the main reasons.

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