Has the Mom Audience Migrated to Twitter?

In my post from last week following the migration of moms from web portals to blogging, I stopped short of saying they were on Twitter. Yes there are some power moms out there tweeting as an extension of their blogs (75% of Twitter Moms maintain a blog as well according to Mashable), but has the mom-audience migrated to Twitter yet?

My first anecdotal thought on this was the Twitter-centric Mashable event last month during Internet Week New York, when one of the speakers touting CircleofMoms.com asked how many of the 250-plus audience were moms. Only three hands were raised, which really surprised me.

So I turned to Quantcast for a bit more scientific sample (although still rough data*) and looked at the demographics for twitter.com visitors and the percentage of people that had children ages 0-17 (Quantcast does not break down this stat by gender, but since Twitter is higher-skewing female — 55% — than the internet average, using it is a viable proxy for the number of moms).

Looking back at January, you can see that only 26% of Twitter users had kids, way below the internet average. But by June, Twitter demographics were looking a lot like the general internet population (42% with kids), and actually showed a higher than average percentage of users with younger kids (which you might expect as Twitter skews young and the average age of a new mom is 25.1 years old according to the US Census Bureau).

The mom-audience IS on Twitter. Brands seeking to reach moms should at minimum ensure they have a Twitter account set up and are using it as part of their overall Social Media listening and communications strategy, especially if they are looking to court moms with young children.

* On Quantcast rough data: I realize that more and more users read their Twitter feeds in Seesmic, Tweetdeck or RSS feeds and that might not be captured by Quantcast, but Nielsen had similar sampling issues when it looked at Twitter churn rates and found even with additional channels the sampling still held.

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