Hat tip to my colleague at Edelman Digital, TJ Kelly for sending this to me last week.
As you can see from the chart above, more than 30% of Twitter's visitors were under 25 up from about 20% of its visitors at the end of 2008; thank you in part to celebrity adoption and the mainstream media mentioning Twitter over 20,ooo times last year on television (can't find the source). Twitter has also extended its global reach expanding in Indonesia, Japan, Mexico to name a few.
What this means for brands.
Brands now have the opportunity to reach more people in more places on Twitter. They need to open up the firewall and be ready to engage in multiple languages by empowering their employee base to serve as brand evangelists. The important thing to remember is that Twitter is just a tool and if the masses move to something else (ah em ... Google Buzz), brands need to be ready and try to forecast consumer behavior in order to stay one step ahead of the game.
One model I use when creating strategic social media plans is to follow the Forrester POST Method (People, Objectives, Strategies, and Technologies or tools) in that order; and notice that technologies is considered last.