Survey Results: 11 Questions About Twitter and Trade Unions [LabourStart]

Key points:

A small but growing number of trade unionists use Twitter, though few are intensive users.
Only a tiny number use Twitter for trade union purposes.
Re-tweeting, the Twitter equivalent of forwardig an email, is not widely used.
Of all the other social networks, only Facebook is widely used and giant sites like MySpace and Bebo are off union members's radar.
Unions that do use Twitter are probably not very good at communicating this fact to members, as most did not know if their unions used Twitter.
Finally, there are considerable differences of opinion among union members online as to the value of Twitter.

The largest groups of respondents came from the United Kingdom (360), Canada (333), the USA (305) and Australia (270).

As the survey was conducted only in English, unsurprisingly over 98% of those responding said they understood English. Other languages they speak included French (17.2%) and Spanish (10.2%).

Less than a third of those responding have an account with Twitter (31.1%). Only 9.1% frequently send out tweets while 15.4% sometimes send them.

Only 99 of them often tweet about trade union issues and double that number sometimes do so.

40 of them say they've signed up to the union twitterers' group (twibe) while 285 said they'd never heard of it but would sign up now. (This resulted in considerable growth for the group.)

Only 5.1% of the respondents frequently "re-tweet" (forward on other people's messages) and an even smaller number (only 1.8%) do this for tweets sent out by LabourStart.

A majority -- 56% -- do not know if their union uses Twitter. 29.2% say their union does not, while less than 15% say their union does.

The respondents use other social networks as well, including Facebook (75.7%), YouTube (37.1%), UnionBook (18.1%) and Flickr (11.7%). The number using other social networks like Bebo, MySpace, Delicious, Second Life and Digg was tiny -- below 6%.

834 of the respondents -- more than half -- left messages with more detailed responses.