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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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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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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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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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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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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