( CNN ) -- Among U.S. adults who go online , 13 % use Twitter -- and more than half ( 54 % ) of these people access the popular social media service with their mobile phone , according to new research from the Pew Internet and American Life Project . The report also revealed some interesting details about the demographics of Twitter users . For instance , 25 % of adult African-Americans who use the Internet are on Twitter , as are 19 % of Hispanic Americans , compared with only 9 % of whites . Where you live also may affect whether you 're on Twitter : About 15 % of both urban and suburban U.S. adult Internet users are on Twitter , vs. only 7 % of rural dwellers . Twitter is slightly more popular with men than women , and most popular with Internet users ages 18 to 29 . Income is not an especially significant indicator of whether someone is likely to use Twitter , but education is : 16 % of college-educated adult Internet users are on Twitter , vs. only 8 % of those who stopped school after graduating high school . `` Mobile Twitter '' can mean several different things , since Twitter exploits nearly every available mobile communication channel . Pew did not examine which types of phones mobile tweeters use , but it 's probably all of them . After all , Twitter was designed from the very beginning to be accessible on even the simplest feature phones ( the next step down from smartphones , representing 70 % of the handsets currently in use in the U.S. ) . This is evidenced by the most obvious characteristic of Twitter -- that tweets are limited to 140 characters . That comes from the constraints of SMS text messaging , which can be done from virtually every cell phone on the planet . Texting is , by most measures , the most popular activity across nearly all mobile demographics and on all types of mobile phones . Twitter also supports optional e-mail notifications , and e-mail is increasingly popular with mobile users on all kinds of phones . On the higher end of mobile , you can access Twitter from a variety of native mobile apps for smartphones and tablets , created by lots of different developers using Twitter 's application programming interface , or API . Twitter also recently updated its mobile website by leveraging new HTML5 capabilities to add interactive features and make the site function more like an app -- at least on smartphones with full-featured browsers . But even on the limited `` microbrowsers '' still common on most feature phones , Twitter 's site offers a fairly user-friendly mobile Web experience . Pew 's report echoes other research that has found that social media is an increasingly popular mobile activity . A February report from comScore noted that social media is currently the fastest-growing content category for mobile users ( up 56 % over the previous year ) . And a year ago , Nielsen noted that 54 % of smartphone users and 36 % of feature phone users were accessing social media via mobile apps . On the flip side , all this research indicates that if you 're using social media , expect that a significant and growing proportion of your audience are on mobile devices . Increasingly , social media will also mean mobile by default . The opinions expressed in this post are solely those of Amy Gahran .
54 % of Twitter users access the social media service through their mobile phone , study shows . New Pew study did not examine which types of phones mobile tweeters use . It said that 16 % of college-educated adult Internet users are on Twitter . It also said that 25 % of adult African-Americans who use the Internet are on Twitter .