In the U.S. Twitter is now as well known among the population as Facebook, with 87% of Americans aware of each social network.

What’s interesting is the difference in growth and in resulting user figures, as shown in the Edison Research/Arbitron Internet & Multimedia Study. In 2008 only 5% of the population was aware of Twitter, as opposed to 50% awareness of Facebook.

The rapid increase in awareness of the microblogging service seems tied to the fact that a high proportion of the active Twitter users are in information sharing industries – e.g. media, marketing etc, and the fact that microblogging itself is so effective as sharing information. As Leo LaPorte said, it’s the ‘nervous system’ of the internet. It’s mean that mainstream television and print media now give a constant presence to Twitter, and more Americans are aware of the service than actually have internet access (87% versus 85%). Maybe they’re all using SMS?

And yet despite this awareness, relatively few people actually use Twitter. The study shows 41% of Americans now have a Facebook profile, but only 7% are on Twitter.

This may simply be down to the lag time between awareness and signing up – after all, Facebook has had 50% awareness for the last 2 years, but only 41% signups.

The insight into Twitter demographics is also interesting. Twitter users are likely to be well educated (63% with a college degree), and in a higher income household. It’s also disproportionately popular with African-Americans (25%) and 79% would rather give up their TV than their internet connection.

Does the comparison matter?

While the comparison between the two social networks is interesting from a social and business point of view – I wonder whether it actually matters in the grand scheme of things. Twitter has over 100 million users, and if they’re skewed towards those with more money, that’s probably even more attractive to advertisers and marketers who want to reach that audience, and probably don’t want to bother with more targeting than they really have to…

Twitter is very much about information sharing on a business and industry level as much as a personal level, as opposed to Facebook, which skews towards the personal. Both overlap in terms of entertainment news and gossip, but Twitter has a slight edge due to the chance to post via SMS and mobile clients, the speed of the information flow, and the ability to query all the data for trending topics and breaking news – whereas because Facebook relies on a two-way agreement for friends, news has to break into your social network before you can discover it.

And despite both companies expanding to try and ‘become the internet’ (Twitter acquires Tweetie, Facebook’s Open Social Graph), there’s definitely room for both approaches to co-exist.