Twitter 13% popular among African American internet users

More people are tweeting than ever before.

A new report from Pew Research shows that 13 percent of online adults are using the service, up from 8 percent in November 2010. Over half of these users access Twitter through a cell phone.

Twitter has been rapidly expanding, with the latest figures showing over 300 million registered accounts.

Twitter adoption is especially high among the African-American and Latino populations. Twenty-five percent of African-Americans and 19 percent of Latinos use Twitter, compared to 9 percent of whites.

Pew notes further that one in ten African-Americans visit Twitter daily, twice the rate for Latinos and four times that for whites.

In November 2010, there was an 8 percentage point difference in Twitter use between African American and white internet users (13% for blacks vs. 5% for whites)," Pew said in its report. "By May 2011, that gap was 16 percentage points -- 25% of online African Americans now use Twitter, compared with 9% of such whites."

Latinos, along with non-Latino African Americans, also are significantly more likely than whites to be Twitter users, the report said.

"One in ten African American internet users now visit Twitter on a typical day -- that is double the rate for Latinos and nearly four times the rate for whites," Pew said.

Twitter usage is also spreading quickly among older adults, between the ages of 25 and 44, over the last six months. From the Pew Center:

Although young adults continue to have relatively high rates of Twitter usage, the number of 30-49 year olds who use the service has doubled since late 2010 -- from 7% of such users in November to 14% in May 2011.

This growth trend is especially pronounced among 25-34 year olds -- Twitter use for this cohort roughly doubled between November 2010 and May 2011, from 9% to 19% -- although growth in Twitter use among internet users ages 35-44 was notable as well (from 8% in late 2010 to 14% in spring 2011).

Why are black people so much more inclined to tweet? A couple of explanations have been put forth. One is a fairly straightforward network effect: The more of your friends that are already on Twitter, the more utility you’ll find in joining. According to Slate’s Farhad Manjoo, black Twitter users are more likely than whites to form into densely-interlinked clusters.

Another theory is that black users report more interest in celebrities and entertainment news, and people with heightened interest in those areas are more likely to join Twitter. But this explanation seems to be somewhat in conflict with the first, which says that black Twitterers are following each other, not people they don’t know personally, and using Twitter more as a messaging service than a news feed. It does, however, help to explain why a disproportionate number of the most influential celebrities on Twitter are African-American: On the Forbes Celebrity 100, eight of the top 20 celebrities in our social rank index are black, as are four of the top 10 social media overachievers.