Courtney Rubin

Twitter's Capital City is New York, Report Finds

A new report says San Francisco is the most connected, but New York City is tops for Twitter.

When it comes to Twitter usage, New Yorkers are tops.

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When it comes to Twitter usage, New Yorkers are tops.

 

Tweet this: The West Coast is more social media savvy than the East Coast, according to a new report. But New Yorkers are tops when it comes to Twitter.

The report examined social media use – including Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook -- by some 2 million business people in 200 U.S. cities, across industries and job functions. Conducted by the sales and marketing database firm NetProspex, the Social Business Report found that social media adoption is spreading through all levels of organizations.

Perhaps not surprisingly, San Francisco and San Jose rank No. 1 and No. 2 for the nation's most connected businesspeople. New York City, Austin and Boston also cracked the top five.

"A Twitter username is becoming just as important as a phone number to reach and engage with customers and prospects," claims the report.
 
For its "Social Index" rankings, NetProspex considered number of employees with at least one social media profile, the average number of connections per employee across major social networks and the average number of tweets, number of followers and number of users following.

On the Twitter-only rankings, New York City was top of the Tweets, followed by San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Sacramento ranked fourth and Phoenix fifth.
 
For industries, the most connected and active on social media were online portal and search engine employees, by a landslide. The industry's average rating was 98.74, nearly one-third higher than the second place finisher: advertising and marketing.  Bankers (No. 3) outranked the traditional media (No. 4), while IT (No. 8) topped software (No. 9). The report identified a near total lack of social media in business-to-business industries.

"This complete absence of low-tech, socially savvy B2B industries illustrates a major differentiation opportunity for emerging brands in this quadrant," observed the report.
 
Trucking and moving was the only traditionally blue collar industry to make the top 50 – it ranked 48. The tobacco industry landed at the very bottom of Twitter industry user, with a rating of just 1.1

Inc. contributing editor Courtney Rubin was for five years a London-based staff writer for People magazine. Rubin, a former senior writer for Washingtonian magazine, has written for the New York Times magazine, Time, Marie Claire, and other publications. She is the author of The Weight-Loss Diaries.