Who in IT is Tweeting the most?
July 13th, 2009 by Hugh Kennedy
Today marks the release of the fourth wave of research into the IT decision-maker that we have completed with our friends at Toolbox. Nearly 3,000 people from developers to the most senior-level IT executives participated, from across the globe.
And guess what? The more senior level the executive, the more they Tweet. In fact, executive IT decision-makers tend to be more active Twitter users and tend to tweet more often than their IT counterparts by a wide margin.
A few of the other highlights:
- Social media consumption continues to outpace editorial and vendor content consumption, increasing from 3.74 hours/week to 4.72 hours/week from Wave III (August 2008) to Wave IV (July 2009)
- Consumption of social and user-generated content (blogs, podcasts, online communities, wikis, and profiles/social networking) continues to rise ahead of editorial media. The Toolbox.com/PJA IT Social Media Index now stands at 195, a 44.5% increase since Wave III research conducted in August 2008.
- Global consumption of social media and user-generated content has remained consistent, with use of profiles, peer-to-peer networking, discussion groups, and blogs leading the growth in consumption and participation.Additional results highlighting attitudes on vendors and Twitter include:
- The majority of executives and professionals value vendor participation in online communities. 34.7% responded that vendors must have a presence in online communities, and 42.0% responded that it is important that vendors listen to their audience and engage in conversation.
- Being transparent and open, posting interesting and relevant content, and responding to members’ questions ranked among the most important contributions that vendors can make in an online community.
- More than 90% of executives and professionals rated topic-based communities and knowledge-sharing communities as most appropriate for vendor participation.
- Among the executives and professionals who use Twitter, more than 72% have less than 50 followers, and 62% described Twitter as becoming more useful for sharing and finding content and expertise.
Seeing some of the usage graphs from these audiences is like looking at Twitter and Facebook hockey-stick ramps of users. Social media is clearly part of the marketing landscape, so why isn’t every company using it?
You can get the full findings deck here.
