5 facts about Twitter at age 10
See a more recent post on Americans and Twitter 
The Twitterverse doesn't always mirror the real world. Nearly two-thirds (63%) of U.S. Twitter users get news via the service, but the reaction on Twitter to major political events and policy decisions often differs considerably from general public opinion. That was the conclusion of a 2013 Pew Research Center study that compared the results of national polls to the tone of tweets in response to eight major news events. The Twitter conversation sometimes was more liberal than survey responses, and other times more conservative, but often what stood out was the overall negativity on Twitter. (Those differences might be related to the demographics traits of Twitter users: Center surveys have consistently found that Twitter users are disproportionately young, urban, African-American, and better educated.)
More recently, The Washington Post found little overlap between the subjects of election-related tweets and the issues Americans identified as most important in casting their votes. For example, while 28% in a Post/ABC News poll identified the economy and jobs as their biggest concern, only 8% of election-related tweets focused on that. Twitter can be a valuable tool in helping to deal with emergencies. A 2012 Pew Research Center study found that Twitter was a critical lifeline when Hurricane Sandy devastated wide swaths of the East Coast in October of that year. Twitter traffic during Sandy and its aftermath was more than double what it was just before the storm hit; people mainly used Twitter to share news and information as well as photos and videos. Similarly, a new study of Twitter activity in 50 metro areas during Sandy found that the per-capita number of Twitter messages in a given area was directly and strongly correlated with the economic damage caused by the storm. That, the researchers said, “makes social media a viable platform for preliminary rapid damage assessment in the chaotic time immediately after a disaster.” They suggested that during a natural disaster, emergency workers and disaster-relief officials should monitor “normalized activity levels, rates of original content creation, and rates of content rebroadcast to identify the hardest hit areas in real time,” and immediately afterward “focus on persistence in activity levels to assess which areas are likely to need the most assistance.” BONUS FACT: Despite Twitter's revenue growth (derived mainly from advertising) and global reach, the company has never turned a profit. Last year, Twitter lost $521 million on revenues of $2.2 billion; it has accumulated losses of nearly $2.1 billion.
