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Generically speaking, the typical social media user looks something like this:

Typical U.S. Social Networking Participant⁶

Globally, social networking participation skews more toward men, a trend which is echoed among participants in the largest social network, Facebook:

Typical Facebook Participant⁷

Twitter is used far less than Facebook. Twitter itself reported some 100 million active users in the second half of 2011, but there have been significant questions about how active most of those users really are.⁸ Still, Twitter’s growth has been strong, with more than three hundred thousand people joining each day. Its growth has been amped up by its role as a conduit for on-the-scene reporting after natural disasters in Haiti and Japan and political uprisings in the Middle East. Beyond the urgent or otherwise newsworthy, the site has proved to be a valuable resource for researchers tracking the more general public mood,⁹ which makes aggregated Twitter feeds a gold mine for understanding how people feel about politics, economics, and other important issues—like, oh, faith, spirituality, religion—on a daily basis.

Its 140-character format is particularly attractive to mobile phone users, making it a more accessible platform for social networking in regions where more expensive desktop, laptop, and tablet computers are thin on the ground. Outside of the U.S., Twitter is most popular in the Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, Indonesia, and Venezuela.¹⁰ Based on data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a typical American Twitter participant looks something like this:

Typical U.S. Twitter Participant¹¹

In Chapter 3, we will provide some further notes on the characteristics of the users of other social media platforms, but this overview of users of the two largest platforms and of social networking sites in general should help make clear that the people most absent from many mainline communities—those under age fifty, men, and people of color—are most likely present in social networking communities. And they are far from uninterested in religious or spiritual concerns.