Twitter mobile directions

Following developments, even trends, with Twitter is something that’s relatively easy to do as plenty of people research and publish data about the micro-blogging service.

Such tracking and paying attention is something I think anyone in the PR business ought to be doing as a matter of course as part of listening to what people are talking about if not actually engaging in some of those conversations.

The latest data I’ve seen comes from HubSpot – the company who published last December’s state of the Twittersphere report – who published information last week on the top Twitter applications and usage.

The first data from HubSpot illustrates the different ways in which people use the Twitter service. As this graph clearly shows, nearly half access the Twitter website directly according to HubSpot.

What I find most interesting, though, is the metric showing that just under 18 percent of users use Twitter via a mobile device. I wish HubSpot had posted a little more information about this metric, indicating how its growing. Perhaps breaking it down, too, by device platform (for instance, what percentage of access is via iPhone and by Windows Mobile devices?), by device type (eg, mobile phones, netbooks, etc), by usage (eg, mobile browser, Twitter app for a mobile device, etc).

Maybe HubSpot didn’t ask such questions and so don’t have the data. Their post doesn’t talk about the survey methodology including in which country(ies) the research was conducted (in the absence of details, I’m assuming it’s US only).

Still, this information is useful, giving you a sense of how people use Twitter. The metrics could be especially useful when added to other surveys and reports on people’s behaviours with communication tools like Twitter.

Brian Solis has a useful post with a little more commentary on HubSpot’s data.

And what about Twitter itself and its business plans following the injection of fresh investor money into the company a few weeks ago?

ReadWriteWeb has a pretty interesting post by Lidija Davis in which she reports that Twitter has a clear idea of its business model.

Todd Dagres, founder of Spark Capital and one of the VCs that poured an additional $35 million into Twitter recently, finds it amusing when people talk about Twitter’s lack of a business model.

"We think it’s kind of funny," Dagres recently told Innovation Economy. "We know how we’re going to do it, and we’re very confident about how we’re going to do it, and it’s not necessarily in our interest to tell people how we’re going to do it."

I like that last paragraph!

I bet mobile will play a big role in Twitter’s revenue model.