Twitter users – addicted and more engaged than ever

Despite reports that Twitter growth has slowed considerably and that many users are either inactive or have given it up, there still appears a good proportion of web users out there that are addicted to the micro-blogging site.

According to data from HubSpot, Twitter’s growth is slowing dramatically – its growth rate falling to 3.5%.

However, Twitterers are more engaged than ever. Global news navigator www.OneNewsPage.com polled its users this week with the question: “Did you try and leave Twitter but found you couldn’t give it up?”

Out of 300 replies, 42% agreed they had tried to quit Twitter but couldn’t give it up.

Dr Marc Pinter-Krainer, CEO of One News Page, said, “Twitter clearly has some addictive qualities for those who get beyond firing off a few tweets and abandoning it shortly afterwards.  They join the likes of comedian Stephen Fry and singer Lily Allen who came back after publicly announcing on Twitter that they were off.”

According to a recent report from The Retrevo Gadgetology title ‘Is social media an addiction?’, about half of Facebook and Twitter users say they check the social networks after they go to bed at night or first thing in the morning.

It reveals that 16% of users of social media say the likes of Facebook and Twitter is how they get their “morning news”.

While nearly half of respondents said they can go a long time between visits to their social networks, 12% said they check in every couple of hours. This behavior is most likely what helped perpetuate Facebook into the top spot when it comes to the most visited websites – stealing Google’s crown.

Meanwhile, YouGov hopes to channel the constant flow of use into useful data with its new polling site.

Social networking sites are already popular venues for people to share their views on politics, brands and news stories and YouGov wants to harness its potential with its new site TellYouGov.

The site is YouGov’s first attempt to meld the data from its more structured surveys with the chaos of the social web. Its homepage shows the latest “real-time public opinion” on subjects ranging from Gordon Brown and David Cameron to Tesco, immigration, Avatar and Lady Gaga.