Oprah and Shaq love Twitter, but how much do conference attendees use it?

We’ve been including attendee Twitter accounts in our conference social networks since 2007, so we have great historical data on how it’s growing within existing communities and into new ones.

If you haven’t seen it yet, HubSpot has published their State of the Twittersphere, covering general Twitter usage. Consider this post the Conference edition.

Here’s the quick summary.

• Usage is growing in every industry (70% per year)
• It’s present in every industry (at least 5% of attendees)
• Attendees tend to be very influential Twitter users (1100 avg followers vs. 70 for a typical Twitter user)

Attendee Characteristics

• We saw a major split in how many people attendees follow. Attendees at business and marketing conferences followed an average of 800 people, while attendees at design and higher education conferences followed an average 225. What does this mean for conference organizers? If attendees in your industry are selective about who they follow then you need to make sure your conference Twitter account keeps a high signal to noise ratio.
• The average attendee has 1100 followers. This is much higher than general Twitter users, which according to HubSpot have an average of 70 followers.
• In the Hubspot survey of users, 12% of users had more than 100 followers. In our data, 68% of attendees had more than 100 followers. Here’s Hubspot’s general follower data vs. our attendee follower data:
  
• The trend toward high follower counts held across all industries, although some industries were much higher than others:
  

Adoption

• Overall, 8.7% of CrowdVine conference attendees included a Twitter account. We have anecdotal evidence that that percentage tracks closely with actual number of active public attendee Twitter accounts. Obviously, it doesn’t count attendees who have private accounts or non-attendees who followed the conference through the conference Twitter account.
• Across industries, we saw at least 5% of conference attendees with Twitter accounts, this includes mainstream industries like higher education and health care:
  

  Tech: 16%
  Business 9%
  Youth 8%
  Health 6.5%
  Higher Education 5%

• Our highest adoption rates did come from Tech conferences, but those weren’t limited to Silicon Valley folk. Three of our four conferences with the highest adoption rates came from regional events in the Southern US or in the UK.
• In the last six months we’ve only seen two conferences with low Twitter usage (1% or lower). One was an internal corporate event which had Twitter users but for cultural reasons they wanted to keep their identities separate. The second group were mostly old-school CEOs. Both conferences were otherwise very active on CrowdVine, so they weren’t technology luddites.
• The highest adoption we’ve seen in a conference was 43% of attendees with a Twitter account. That could easily be a measure of how compelling / easy it is to add your Twitter account to CrowdVine. So if you think that conference, Social Graph Foo Camp held in early 2008, actually had 80% Twitter adoption then you could double all of our other adoption numbers. We have some ways we can look at this issue the next time we do this report.

Growth

• In conferences where we have multiple year data, we’ve seen adoption jump by 70%. This data includes events outside of Web 2.0 early adopters.
• The range of growth within conference series was between 50 and 100%. However, during that same period, Twitter reported that they grew 1400%. We think that indicates much of Twitter’s growth is coming from new communities.

If you have any Twitter data you’d like to share, post it in the comments.

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