Twitter : Where Are The Normal People?

Social Media, Twitter September 18, 2009 37 Comments @niallharbison

Although Twitter has becoming increasingly popular in the last couple of years there do seem to be a certain amount of trends emerging as to who the people on the site actually are. We wanted to see who the people actually using it were and also find out why the normal man in the street doesn’t seem to be getting involved with the service. There are some exceptions of course but here are the 5 main groups of people on the service…

1.Geeks

Twitter started off as a very geeky tool and to a certain extent it still has a strong geek undercurrent. Ask any sort of geeky question and it is sure to be answered instantly and it means that a huge cornerstone of the Twitter community is built on relationships between people who are tech savvy.

2.Publishers/Broadcasters

Every single newspaper, radio station and television show on the planet seems to have arrived within the last few months as they try to “engage” with their users in an entirely new way. Clever examples have been publishers/broadcasters who have tried to incorporate user feedback from Twitter into their shows rather than just trying to push out their message.

3.Marketers

These are the people who join the service with one thing in mind…marketing their product. Although they are very easily filtered out by those in the know they continue to blast out their message in a constant stream of updates pointing people to their money making schemes or business coaching because for the first time they think they have a ready made accessible market only a couple of clicks away.

4.Social Misfits

Some people can have a hard time communicating in the real world and struggle to interact with other human beings in a real world situation but luckily Twitter means you get to interact and have as close to normal real world conversations in an online setting as possible. This is part of the huge attraction to the service by many in that it has opened up a huge range of possibilities for many to interact with others who can do so from behind their keyboard.

5.Businesses

Nearly every single business in the world now knows that they need to be on Twitter which has seen them arrive in their droves. Some have embraced the medium successfully and interacted with their customers to increase sales or provide top class customer service but the vast majority have not. In fairness there is a fairly steep initial learning curve here for people who have not operated in this sort of space before.

Where Are The Normal Folk?

Where are all my friends? I mean my normal friends who I go to the pub with? The answer is they are all very aware of Twitter and most have even tried it. They can see the power of it and actually mostly understand it fully at this stage but they simply don’t care. They say that they might use it for search in the future or to follow celebrities but the biggest problem they have is that they just won’t update their status. Most normal people don’t want to share everything they do on a micro blogging website and never will, simple as that.

The question that everybody is asking is when will all the normal people arrive on Twitter but they have been asking that question for some time now and I am just not sure there is something in it for them like there is for the groups of people above.

Comments

http://www.grangewebdesign.com Kieran Daly

There are loads of normal people using Twitter (not me of course). People who have PCs and Tweetdeck sitting / rotting on their desktop have access do.

I think growth will happen when we have more widespread free wireless connectivity AND there is a group text feature then ‘normal’ people will use it as a group text feature. This isn’t what is is meant for but it will be an attractive feature.

Saturday night in the pub Tweet 30 friends to say that you are in the pub and come on down. Hence why I am not normal as I rarely go to the pub and definitely don’t know 30 people who I would want to meet there.

http://www.simplyzesty.com Niall Harbison

Kieran

That is exactly the sort of thing that I was really looking forward to using Twitter for. I would love to be able to see that one of my friends was in town having a coffee and then I could tweet them and meet up. Can’t see it happening though and imagine that will be more the Geo social networks that are staing to come along like Locle etc. As for 30 friends…nobody should have that many!

http://www.lickablewallpaper.com Eddie

Most regular people like easy access to photos and video and apps etc. which is probably why they’re not drawn to Twitter.
http://www.2kad.net Paul

I believe Twitter is past its peak now. They need to do something to protect it against the misuse it suffers by companies, marketers and spammers, but I don’t know what. I stay in touch with quite a few friends via Twitter and also repost the very best material from my humour blog there.

http://www.simplyzesty.com Niall Harbison

Yeah I have to say I am wondering has it passed it’s peak too at this stage. The spamming and others can always be filtered out but if they are the only people on there what then?

http://thisiswhatido.org Darragh

JEBUS. So all these people I’ve been interacting with are geeky social misfits or geeky marketers working in publishing or broadcasting or a business and that’s why they’re on twitter?

Wow, and there was me thinking there was a much wider range of people all communicating on there from every possible walk of life.

Niall, maybe you’d want to start looking at who you follow?

(Another post I’ve read on this site that I’m amazed by. You seem intent on turning people off the internet and engaging with people in a meaningful way there, rather than evangelising and advocating. Are you in the wrong line of work?)

http://www.simplyzesty.com Niall Harbison

I am just writing what I see happening. The word that is causing the offense I think is normal and probably my fault for using it in that way. Do I think most of the people on Twitter are from a marketing/geeky publishing/business type of background? Yes. are there exceptions, yes of course. Am I one of those people? Yes. Am I slagging off twitter for that and saying it shouldn’t exist and people on there are not normal? 100% not. I have friends who work online all day and use facebook etc constantly but my question is after all the publicity where the hell are they? It is perfectly normal for me and you to update our status cause we are bloggers at heart and like having our voices heard but do most people give a toss about doing that? nope

I got excited about twitter when thinking about using twitter to see which of my non worky/internety friends were in town to meet for a coffee but I am afraid that will never happen.

As for putting people off the internet I don’t agree as I will often preach on about twitter and it’s great capacity for interaction and have written many posts like that here but it needs to be analyzed from both sides. Will I continue to use it and reccomend it to clients, always, but it is not the be all and end all of social media, it is only 1 tiny little % of the bigger picture.
http://thisiswhatido.org Darragh

Niall, can I ask – how did you come to start using twitter? What was it about it?
http://www.simplyzesty.com Niall Harbison

I have lived online for 3 years and would consider myself a “geek”. It would have been kind of hard to miss it. I am attracted to it as I like interacting with people online
http://thisiswhatido.org Darragh

Okay, so if we just take you as an example – “you like interacting with people online” – I assume you saw you could do that, you gave it a go and it worked out for you. Not all your tweets are geeky/pimping/linking – there’s a lot of you in there. For the most part though, you spent time on it because it proved of value.

The simple fact is – not many people do the same.

Look at Skype as a perfect example – possibly the cheapest phonecalls on the planet and yet most people (including me) don’t use it. Why? Haven’t tried it or spent time learning it.

I don’t think everyone should be on twitter. Just like not everyone needs a mobile phone. Or a camera. Or a website. I do think though that showing people how to use it, how it could be relevant to them and what it could mean for them is a great start.

http://twitter.com/rubot rubot

In fairness, 90% of my friends are not on it. Those 10% would lean towards the geekier side of things generally….:)
http://www.danielsullivan.ie/blog Daniel Sullivan

Daragh, what Niall says is correct. Most people aren’t on twitter. And the majority of those who are would fall into the categories of that he has described or the general notion of being early adopters. It can be hard to accept but you’re not normal, I’m not normal and Niall is not normal. We aren’t the norm. You can find people from all walks of life in prison too but that doesn’t hide the fact that most in there are from deprived backgrounds. Same situation with twitter or even blogging, there are people from lots of different backgrounds but there is still a preponderance of those from the social tech and the PR/marketing worlds.

And it is just my view but the role of someone commenting on technology shouldn’t be about simply evangelising but about sorting the wheat from the chaff in a rational manner. Evangelising about everything that cross your path isn’t helpful to anyone. Not saying you do that but you appear to suggest that Niall should be doing so.

For sure Twitter has it’s uses but as a mass technology for the great mass of people it has no compelling reason to use it. Most people aren’t currently interested in updating the world on the state of their doings and can’t see any reason to keep up to date on the same. Twitter is in reality a centralised micro-email platform that allows content to go to subscribed recipients that you don’t need to manage and beyond. I suspect the description of it as a micro-blogging site is inaccurate and has hindered its wider usage.
http://www.managementmatters.ie Claire Boyles (Business Coach)

I am a little surprised at this article. I wonder how you collected your information?

I use twitter for business- for sure. I tweet things that are useful & valuable information to my potential customers & I tweet about my social activities too.

I have not only found many new clients on twitter – but also have made many new friends.

Last night I met with a group of friends- all of whom I met with on twitter & I couldn’t say I could refer to any of them as geeks, (well maybe one)

I’ve used twitter a lot to meet up with friends- the week before last a friend was at a pub listening to live music, they tweeted about it. We started a conversation & he ended up persuading me to go and join in, despite my protestations of an early night! Last week someone else I’d met through twitter tweeted he was heading for a pint & named the pub- and I decided to join him. While we were in the pub 2 really lovely people from the states joined us. None of us had ever met them before. You wanna know how they came to join us? Because they’d been following one of us, and had tweeted they were coming to Ireland on their honeymoon. We had a really enjoyable evening- great laughs.

These are just a few of the examples that I have of experiences of meeting “normal” non geeks on twitter.

If you’ve written this deliberately to stir debate as a guerilla marketing tactic fair play to you. If not then maybe you do need to expand your research. I don’t think you’re seeing the whole picture.

If twitter was only for businesses with no “normal” people then it would not be able to be a good customer relation tool. You can check out the results of a survey done by IGO people that show businesses are finding it a useful tool for communicating with customers.
http://www.igopeople.com/o/2-igopeople/posts/27276-igopeople-twitter-for-business-survey-results
http://www.insideview.ie Bernie Goldbach

I teach an accredited creative multimedia degree in third level. Fewer than 30% of those starting that Honours degree are on Twitter when they begin their first week. That’s a higher percentage than I can find using Twitter in my housing estate. Your commune uses the tools that work best for its members.

http://www.simplyzesty.com Niall Harbison

Summed up perfectly

http://thisiswhatido.org Darragh

Daniel, define “normal” then. if I go with “conforming to the standard or the common type; usual; not abnormal; regular; natural”, then I’d have to at least claim to be and ask you to state how I (or actually you!) are not?

Are there ANY normal people on the net at all then? Do we just say that because you happen to use a service, you’re not normal. Maybe then mobile users aren’t normal. Or TV users aren’t normal. See, this comes back to trying to box people off, or label them and doing that PR thing rather than just saying “people are using Twitter” the same way that they read newspapers, send text messages and listen to music.

“Most people aren’t on twitter” – does not mean that “those who are aren’t normal”

I am not saying that Niall should be evangelising about everything that crosses his path at all, but I do think that representing the company he does, and claiming to do the things he does “He says â€œIâ€™m keen to help small brands get their message out to the world and engage with their customers using the free tools available to them.” (from the SZ about page) should be looking at ways to show his clients about how to engage with those out there, rather than saying they’re not normal. If Niall is claiming to offer a service (http://www.simplyzesty.com/services/) including “With the rise in popularity of social networks we help you target your customers through social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Bebo and engage with them in a meaningful way” then why does it seem (to me) that he takes every opportunity to knock it? Maybe it’s a ploy to get comments like this. I don’t know. This is nothing personal against Niall, but I find it frustrating to see a professional in the space that I work in just not getting it and using labels like “normal” to help people stay away.

I agree with you regarding calling Twitter a “micro-blogging” service, that’s for sure. It does have its uses, like everything else, and its misuses too.

http://www.simplyzesty.com Niall Harbison

Following on from above the biggest problem is the term “normal”. I would be describing myself as abnormal if I was saying the people on Twitter were not normal as I am an avid user. A better title would be “Why is the man (or woman) in the street not using Twitter?”

I often write posts to polarize with the intention of getting good comments going but this was not one of them. I really am just wondering when or if the guys I hang out with in the pub will be on Twitter. I doubt they will
http://www.danielsullivan.ie/blog Daniel Sullivan

Daragh, the problem with the use of words like normal is that they have rather correct meanings in the world of maths from which they come but have often come to be understand as meaning something else when in fact they don’t. Average is another word that gets misused. And average and normal aren’t the same either.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution

So what is normal is that which is clustered around the middle of a distribution. The distribution could be made up of interests, income, age, educational background, musical tastes whatever you like. Since people are made up of a variety of unique characteristics it is actually quite hard for anyone to be ‘normal’ for all measurable behaviours and activities along with other characteristics. So to be normal you need to like what most other people like and do what most other people do, and using twitter is not something that most people other than yourself are doing. Hence, you are not normal, nor am I. Almost no one is completely normal but when it commons to twitter as in this case, with most people not using it then they are by definition normal and those of using it are not normal.

My apologies for the pedantic nature of the reply but I’m an engineer not a sociologist and some words really do mean what they mean.

http://www.garrendennylane.ie/blog Lorna

I liked Keith Bohanna’s description of Twitter being like a cool restaurant where ‘cool’ people hang out! (he also described Facebook as Mc Donalds, Linked in as a restaurant with suits, websites as a dinner party and blogs as bbqs – if I remember them all correctly. So I think the description of twitter users by Keith was quite compliementary.

http://www.simplyzesty.com Niall Harbison

Yeah Keith is a lot smarter man than me and got it spot on with that description. Twitter is for the cool kids

http://antonmannering.com Anton Mannering

“Nearly every single business in the world now knows that they need to be on Twitter which has seen them arrive in their droves. Some have embraced the medium successfully and interacted with their customers to increase sales or provide top class customer service but the vast majority have not. In fairness there is a fairly steep initial learning curve here for people who have not operated in this sort of space before.”

Emmmm.. Do they? Do all businesses now know they need to be on twitter?? If as you say the “normals” haven’t arrived, well if that’s my market there wouldn’t really be any point in being on there would there?
Largely speaking isn’t it kind of futile to use any tool to try and communicate with a group of people who don’t use it?
My experience is that there are in fact whole communities of people who have almost no members using twitter. If I’m trying to speak to those people should I use twitter? Isn’t that a bit like using telesales to reach customers who don’t have phones?

I’d suggest strongly that twitter is a great tool to use if you want to use people that are using twitter. How much I’d rely on twitter as a tool would depend on the audience I was trying to reach.

I would also question the notion that there is a steep learning curve for using twitter. I would suggest that it’s shallower than for almost any other communication tool which is of course it’s attraction as a point of entry for social media.

http://www.simplyzesty.com Niall Harbison

Ah the steep learning curve is that it can go massively wrong for some people at the start just coming in to sell, sell sell and plenty of people get called C*nts for taking their first steps and making small mistakes. What gets me the most is that every client we speak to these days wants to only talk about Twitter as if it is some sort of magical tool that will fill sell all their products. There is so so much more to social media than that and you are right that no point talking if nobody listening
http://antonmannering.com Anton Mannering

Anyone who uses any new tool without at least observing what others are doing first (if not taking instruction) and then proceeds without caution is a fool and deserves the results. Imagine using a hammer that way!!!
I would suggest this is an indicator of a business that has far bigger problems than it’s misuse of twitter.

John Lee

By normal people do you mean “common” or “ordinary” – sorry mate but I only tweet with uncommon and extraordinary people.
http://arenaschool.com Colm

jeepers – major hoo haa over this one Niall!
c’mon lads – if you look beyond what is probably a bad turn of phrase (i.e. normal people) and focus in on the point Niall is making – there is a lot validity to it. I also have a lot of tech savvy friends who just don’t use twitter at all – and some of those are very geeky too. Twitter has higher barriers to entry in my view aswell. Facebook et al. have higher engagement rates and therefore more users and more active users because the main conduit to use it is facebook.com – when people first use twitter.com they don’t see the value of twitter. For me, it was only when I got an iphone and started using one of the many twitter iphone clients that I truly started to appreciate the value of twitter.
An interesting segway would be to find out twitter usage amongst iphone users – my guess would be that it would be considerably higher than overall usage.
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http://www.mcawilliams.com mcawilliams

I am normal!

http://www.simplyzesty.com Niall Harbison

Yes John I can confirm having seen you up close and personal that you are indeed normal

http://www.sineadcochrane.com SinÃ©ad

Some of the comments here suggest that most Twitter users are bloggers, and have some involvement in either the IT or the media sector, but from my own research on Irish bloggers I found that there was no link between being involved with IT and the inclination to blog. In fact, I found that only 30% of Irish bloggers were coming from the IT industry and only 17% were coming from the Media sector.
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So where do the rest fit in? Geeks? Social misfits? Normals?
Â
These are totally different categories/descriptions from â€œpublishersâ€ or â€œmarketerâ€ etc. and are unfair speculations with regard to personality types. Besides, most research has shown that extroverted people are just as attracted to computer mediated communications as introverted ones. Also, being a geek these days is far more â€œnormalâ€ than itâ€™s ever been and itâ€™s meaning has dramatically changed too.
Â
Members of online communities often make the assumption that they have a thorough understanding and awareness of the online landscape and who travels through it. However, Twitter is not an ideal landscape to navigate in an attempt to discover individuals outside of your own community, so itâ€™s even easier to make assumptions like the ones above.
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Is it not more rational to assume that those who tweet have something to say, and those who donâ€™t, donâ€™t?
http://www.danielsullivan.ie/blog Daniel Sullivan

Sinead, if the numbers were exclusive to one another then 47% of bloggers being from the tech or media worlds would be wholly unrepresentative of the wider national population.

Again, I’ll beat the drum of there being no online communities. There are communities of people who are online but no online communities. There is no twitter or blogging community. As for rationality, tweeting and being on twitter are not necessarily the same thing. There would appear a significant listener population on twitter who aren’t much interested in tweeting themselves but are inclined to follow. The lurker/listener phenomena has been known about from much early research work on various bulletin-boards.

http://www.sineadcochrane.com SinÃ©ad

There was a piece of research conducted by DCU in 2006 which found that blogging in Ireland was dominated by members of the IT industry, but in the last 3 years this has shifted significantly (going from over 90% to only 30%).
Â
Yes it might still be â€œwholly unrepresentative of the wider national populationâ€ but it still doesnâ€™t make it right to describe all bloggers as IT people and is an interesting statistic to look at when considering future trends.
http://www.simplyzesty.com Niall Harbison

Yeah pretty sure Bloggers can and do come from all walks of life. It takes a certain type of person to Twitter or Blog but they certainly can’t be pigeon holed into chefs, or techies or journos etc. Generally a large percentage of people just have no interest in having their voice heard and prefer to have their thoughts kept private.

Sinead I would agree with the research as it just seems like blogs are popping up all over the place in Ireland these days and it has moved well beyond tech at this stage

http://www.danielsullivan.ie/blog Daniel Sullivan

Sinead, where here was it said that all bloggers were IT people? I suspect that people are saying that X was said and reacting to that instead of responding to what was actually said.
http://www.2kad.net Paul

I wouldn’t really count people I “know” purely on Twitter as friends. If I’ve had significant contact in person or via the phone then I might call them friends, but a brief exchange on Twitter really doesn’t count for me.
Sidrah Zaheer Siddiqui

The first time I used Twitter back in early 2009, instantly I fell in love with the site. I was just wondering why the whole world is not using it. And within the next few months, the world started using it and has not stopped since. I think the site was bound to be great. The concept is amazing.
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Twitter : Where Are The Normal People?

1.Geeks

2.Publishers/Broadcasters

3.Marketers

4.Social Misfits

5.Businesses

Where Are The Normal Folk?

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25 Unmissable Social Media Articles To Read This Weekend – 20th May

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Follow us on Twitter

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