New York:
While Twitter has nearly equalled Facebook in awareness among Americans -- 87 per cent now know of it, compared with 26 percent last year -- it still lags behind in use.
In addition, according to an Edison Research study, Twitter is disproportionately popular among African-Americans. A quarter of users are African-Americans, the study found, about double their percentage of the American population. Twitter users are also far more likely to have graduated from a four-year college, attended graduate school and live in households making over $50,000 a year.
Though slightly more than half of regular users never post status updates on Twitter, 70 percent do so on social networking sites like Facebook, among others. The disparity, the report notes, suggests that Twitter functions more as a "broadcast medium" compared with Facebook.
Nevertheless, users are more than three times as likely to follow brands and companies on Twitter as other users of social networks do, with over 40 percent using Twitter to learn about and provide opinions on brands.
Tom Webster, vice president for strategy and marketing at Edison, cited a recent Pew report that found an overrepresentation of African-Americans on the mobile Web, adding that they were also more likely to post status updates on all social networks.