Pew Research said 13 percent of U.S. Web users surveyed said they used Twitter, up from 8 percent in November. Twitter also unveiled new search, a photo-sharing service and the Follow Button.
Twitter use is
growing as some 13 percent of online adults surveyed said they use the
microblog, which lets people update their status in 140-character messages
called tweets.
Pew Research
said Twitter use saw a "significant
increase" from the 8 percent of online adults who said they used Twitter
last November.
Twitter
surveyed 2,277 online adults 18 and older via phone in English and Spanish
between April 26 and May 22, 2011. Pew said 95 percent of Twitter users said
they own a mobile phone, with 54 percent of these users tweeting from their
handsets.
Just as in the
November study, Pew
found that Twitter use among African Americans
and Latinos is high. Some 25 percent of African Americans Web users employ
Twitter at least sometimes, compared with just 9 percent of white Web users who
said they use the service. Also, 19 percent of Latinos surveyed said they use
Twitter.
Moreover,
Twitter is predominantly used by younger Web users. Nineteen percent of people
aged 25 to 34 claimed they use Twitter, up from 9 percent in late 2010. Also,
14 percent of users aged 35 to 44 said they use Twitter, up from 8 percent last
year.
Twitter is
believed to command something in the range of 200 million users, though the
microblog won't confirm those numbers due to all of the people who use the
service from third-party mobile clients.
Twitter CEO
Dick Costolo said at the D9 conference June 1 that Twitter users were pumping
out 1 billion tweets every six days. Costolo also said there are over 600,000
Twitter developers.
To help boost
growth, Twitter unveiled new features this week. At D9, Costolo
unveiled Twitter's new photo-sharing service,
which is powered by PhotoBucket.
Over the next
few weeks, Twitter users will be able to upload a photo and attach it to their
tweet right from Twitter.com, as well as Twitter's official mobile applications.
Twitter also
said it improved its search engine to surface
photos and videos in addition to tweets.
A day earlier the
company
launched the Follow Button on more than 50 sites
to let users find and follow Twitter accounts of media reporters, athletes,
celebrities and others with a single click.
Users can also
see the profile and latest Tweets of the account they want to follow by
clicking the user name next to the Button.
Twitter
partners such as AOL.com, Britney Spears, CBS Interactive, CBS News, cnet.com,
CNNMoney, Jennifer Lopez, Lady Gaga and others are embedding the Follow Button,
whose code may be found
here.
Twitter's Follow
Button will be compared with Facebook's Like Button, which launched last year,
and Google's +1 button, which also launched today.
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