Recent research by some Harvard grad students show that the median number of Tweets for Twitter users is one. And the top 10% of twitter users generate 90% of the Tweets. Clearly celebrities, brands and social enthusiasts are active on Twitter. The rest of the user base is only consuming or probably not even active. Similar numbers were cited by Walt Mossberg at the D conference.

That shows that while Twitter is the current fad and certainly hyped, there is a growing number of people (in the millions) who are getting value from it. We can cite several examples from our consulting work where Twitter has unearthed new prospects for technology brands.

Linkedin is superb tool in our opinion for business development (finding and connecting) and for thought leadership (Linkedin groups and answers). The latter takes work and effort but can but done well can be a very productive lead gen tool. Where else can you pin point and engage a business community with a depth of rich profile data to analyze rather than conversing with a userid or an email address.

Bottomline, both are important for brands if they are used the right way. Current number distributions are more or less even.

It will be interesting to see how B2B brands fare on Facebook as opposed to Linkedin or even Twitter.

Linkin is probably the only social media website that is dominated by men. So in many ways this is a non-targeted metric based poll. It really doesn't measure anything except what a lot of us already knew.

Twitter is popular and gaining popularity.

The first problem with this is that they are comparing Twitter, Facebook, LinkIn with iPhone and Digg.

iPhone shouldn't even be here. It should be in a poll about the best portable handheld pda and not in a social media poll.

Digg, although has social network aspects to it, its not the primary focus of the site and should be compared to other news aggregation sites like Reddit.

If you take those two out, you're left with Twitter, LinkIn and facebook.

Statistically, doing this poll on a skewed website like LinkIn which is dominated by older men vs the traditional bell curve of social media in itself sort of invalidates the findings.

In the end, if you compare apples to apples, all you can gleen from this poll is that Twitter is popular not useful.

This is vital tool for my research purposes.

Thank you very much !

Jg

I love this quote:
"This may be a nice little conversation starter but let's not try to dress it up as "high quality" research because that it is not!"

- Twitter is currently the sexy platform... fun, exciting, lots of hype. Larry King? Oprah? All news channels are saying "follow us on Twitter," and it's getting some great exposure at a mainstream level (as opposed to a year or two ago when it was getting exposure amongst the early adopters and social media folks).

Note, I said "currently"

- Most people have no idea what to do with LinkedIn. Or, for that matter, what to do (strategically or tactically) with any other platform.

- I think it's more important to have a social media strategy that includes a number of platforms, as opposed to saying "Twitter is #1, the others are no good" or, as some comments above say "Twitter is for ________ and LI is for ________ and FB is for _________." I think this is misleading, assuming that only B2B is done on LI... seriously? Not.

- Different platforms have different strengths - Twitter is simple and designed to share a very short message. To do that in LinkedIn or Facebook is not the same, because those tools were designed for different things and appear to be much noisier.

thoughts? I'm sure there are more, but this isn't my blog post :p

Jason Alba
Creator - LinkedInForJobSeekers.com (not just for job seekers)

People/consumers are on Twitter (thanks to Oprah)
- Any subject - any purpose messages.

Businessmen are all on LinkedIn because:
- They are all eager to get a better job.
- The questions and answers are business related.

But the best use Twiiter has is customer service. I have reached a major level of frustration using someone's product, scaremed my pain into Twitter, and have had two results. Silence, and a contact from the company or the developer asking how they can help. Guess which products I'm still using.

The first time that happened I got the clue on the importance of twitter.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/robertpestello

All the best,

Robert Pestello

http://www.lohad.com/?p=3489

All the best. Great blog! :)

Try as I might, I simply can't see Twitter as anything but a fad. Outside of the hardcore techie demographic, how many people are still going to be receiving 200 random, impersonal text messages per day from celebrities and corporations by Christmas?

I also think the general homepage of LinkedIn when you're logged in is too difficult to actually focus on any one thing - It's very text heavy. Facebook has lots of people's profile pics that immediate catch my attention and I know immediately which news I'm interested in without having to read the person's name. I also love the customisation they've offered for removing people you don't care about from your stream. By comparison my LinkedIn page has lots of news of people who while they may be useful business contacts I'm actually not interested in what they're doing on the network...

My two cents anyway.

Not being able to network as much as I would have liked, I stopped using LinkedIn, and spent more time with Facebook and Twitter. I still use LinkedIn as an online resume, but for networking it isn't my primary place.

Hah, yes - we do mention that often, primarily for two reasons:

1) We aim to help professionals be as successful, productive and effective as possible, and since there's often (but not always) a correlation between professional success and income, we like to believe that a high average HHI is one indication that we're doing our job well :)

2) There are many marketers looking to reach people with high disposable incomes or who are in positions to make big decisions for their companies, but media fragmentation has made finding and reaching those people at scale more difficult then ever, in any medium. So we do like to remind marketers (maybe a tad too often) that we can help them reach that audience effectively and efficiently.

Thanks again for the coverage here Marshall, I'm a fan of RWW.

Cheers,
Steve

Steve Patrizi
VP, Advertising Sales & Operations
LinkedIn

Thanks for publishing this and for digging into the results.

The biggest surprise to me is that there's no clear run-away leader here despite the varying degrees of media coverage that the different platforms enjoy at the moment. For the most part, marketers think that all of these platforms are equally important to master, give or take a few percentage points. Twitter is the newest (from a mainstream perspective) and most unknown of the entities at this point, so I'm not too surprised to see them a few points ahead, but clearly people feel that all of these platforms are going to be important elements of how marketers connect with their customers.

We work with a number of brands who find LinkedIn to be a highly effective vehicle for reaching affluent, influential, and successful businesspeople. Third party research from Nielsen indicates the people using LinkedIn are more likely to be a decision maker for their company and have a higher income than the readers of some of the more popular mainstream business sites. Since these professionals are often using LinkedIn to find answers, advice and information to help them make smart business decisions, it's a relevant contextual environment for many marketers.

@Alex Trup - if you're interested, you might want to take a look at some of the LinkedIn success stories that members have shared with us: http://learn.linkedin.com/videos/

Best,
Steve Patrizi
VP, Advertising Sales & Operations
LinkedIn

Niki Wise
Business Consultant

LinkedIn makes it virtually impossible to find useful potential business contacts and then to actually connect with them you have to jump through various hoops when it should be just as simple as Twitter's one button follow request.

The original premise of LinkedIn was that you would have your contacts introduce you to their contacts and in a way it would build trust on both sides, but the fact of the matter is it's an inconvenience to do that. Business people are keen to do business with each other whether or not they have some kind of mutual contact/friend.

Twitter isn't perfect and definitely needs a better way for organising and searching through its member database (something even more powerful than 3rd parties like WeFollow and MrTweet are offering), and perhaps that may become one of their premium add-ons at a later date. I think LinkedIn has missed the boat now even to Facebook which I see harbouring a large pool of my existing business contacts (although I wouldn't go about finding new contacts on there).

Your site is one of my favorites seen around blog explosion. Keep up the good work.I wish you all the best in all years.

With Regards,
Karly Domonyi
Hungary

I love them both, for extraordinarily different reasons. We use Twitter for our own brand (an agency) and for a growing number of our client brands. Who, what and how are brands using LinkedIn for anything remotely close?

It's like saying 'what's more more important for your business --- giving people weekends off, or asking them to sometimes work late?'...

With that in mind, I think it is misleading to conclude that 'business people say Twitter is more important'. I'd say business people are aware they need to pay attention to Twitter for branding!

You will find brands and corporations making use of Twitter, while LinkedIn users focus more on their personal information, connections, etc.

This is to the exception of hiring/recruiting activities of course.

Maybe the publicity will make it true. I remain skeptical. But I'm still on Twitter all the time.

http://brisbane.at9t.com/

Secondly it's interesting that they chose to add the iphone in with the social media sites. I can't say it really fits and if it does then it should have added the Blackberry.

Most importantly were the headline outcome of the survey. Poll: Business People Say Twitter More Important Than LinkedIn

It's good to see that all three of the social sites were close overall and that if companies went by the poll results they'd want to concentrate on a balance between the highest ranks #1 Twitter, #2 Facebook and #3 Linkedin of course it may be desirable to utilize an iPhone ranked #4 as well as Digg #5 with 3% as your supplementary strategy.

The three social networking sites are each important assets to a business in this day and age since the consumers as well as peers are active participants. Determine what your company goals are and work the three social sites into a cohesive strategy. If done properly it will help promote your brand, create a larger customer base, and support your current customer base as well as increase sales after all that's what business is all about.