This fascinating chart from Silicon Alley Insider (via social media optimization), goes through the current Twitter demographics.    With Twitter traditionally having been seen as the preserve of the over 25s or even over 30s, it’s interesting to see that the highest rate of growth comes from the under 24s.

At the end of 2009, tweeple 24 and under accounted for 30%, up from 20%  at the end of 2008.   A sign that it might slowly be broadening its appeal from 30 something bloggers and early adopters?

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Fellow online PR Danny Whatmough posed the question today about whether social media is really about ‘ego.’   Clearly I don’t think it is, but in reply I referenced the Oxford Academic Press stat that the second most popular word on Twitter is “I.”

Journalism and SEO blogger Malcolm Coles then joined the conversation to point out that incidences of “I” tend to vanish around lunchtime, so most narcissists tend to be around in the morning (that’s when I tweet…).

Malcolm originally published his post in April, but the chart on his blog from Trendistic is a dynamic one (I’ve taken a version below) and so the results are constantly up to date.   And sure enough, the Dec stats show exactly the same as the April ones.

Every single day last week the use of “I” in tweets was at a high in the morning in the UK (so middle of the Night US – when maybe people are on who don’t use Twitter professionally?), visibly dropped by lunch GMT (7am EST), and then started climbing again until it reached its late night US / early morning UK peak.

Not sure how much you can really read into this, but it does give an indication of when personal tweeters who talk about their lives are likely to be on, and when you can catch those who log on mainly for work / network building reasons.

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A study by Royal Pingdom, which looked through three weeks worth of tweets from 21 Oct – 11 Nov, confirms that Twitter is still very much a US dominated network.

The average number of tweets per hour showed a dip between 8am – 1pm Central European Time (or between 7am – Noon GMT), when Europeans get into work but still the middle of the night for the US.   But at the same time, things clearly picked up around 4pm central Europe, or 10am East Coast US, so near the start of the American working day.

Royal Pingdom also found that people tweet a lot at work with activity going down at weekends.   This shows that Twitter’s ‘power users’ - the 5% who account for 75% of tweets according to a separate study by Sysomos – are biased towards professionals who have Twitter open in the office even though they might be broadcasting personal messages.

That previous study by Sysomos confirms Twitter’s US and also anglophone bias.   Sysomos found that 62% of users were in the US with the UK trailing far behind in second place with 8%.   Canada had 5% of users and Australia 3%.

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