Social media usage surged among U.S. adults ages 50 and up, according to a latest survey by Princeton Survey Research Associates on behalf of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, Media Post reported.

The survey also suggested social media may be an effective advertising and marketing platform to reach older Internet users.

Photo: Tim Boyle/Getty Images

According to Pew, social network use among online users age 50 or above was up from 22 percent in April 2009 to 42 percent in May 2010. Moreover, one out of 10 people in the 50+ age group uses Twitter or a similar "status update" service to post updates or check friends' updates.

To break down the age bracket even more, among adults age between 50 and 64, social media use jumped from 25 percent to 47 percent from April 2009 to May 2010, and among those 65 and older, use surged from 13 percent to 26 percent. On the other hand, use among people age between 18 and 29 only increased from 76 percent to 86 percent, according to The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.

In an attempt to ramp up its advertising model, Twitter has hired two employees to sell ads, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries reported today for Wall Street Journal Blogs.

The microblogging site has hired Amanda Levy, the first ad saleswoman for review site Yelp, and Dan Coughlin, former director of media sales at Facebook. Levy will be Twitter's sales director in the Western region, while Coughlin will be sales director for the East. In an e-mailed statement, Twitter's chief operating officer, Dick Costolo stated that the company is "putting together a top-flight sales team as we begin to open our Promoted Suite of products to more companies," according to the WSJ.

Both Levy and Coughlin will report directly to Costolo, and will focus on building out the "Twitter Promoted Products" area of the company, which consists of Promoted Tweets and Trends, TechCrunch explained yesterday.

AdAge reported that although Twitter has only experimented with ads and promotions in the past, future plans call for increasing revenue in the fourth quarter while testing different types of ad units.

Researchers at Hewlett-Packard have analysed 2.5 million tweets and used its "Influence-Passivity Algorithm," and found that technology website Mashable is the most influential Twitter account, based on links posted and links retweeted, MediaGuardian reported today.

"Influence" is different from "popularity," the research notes, as influence has to do with engagement, and popularity is based on the number of followers a Twitter account has.

The study states: "In spite of the seemingly chaotic fashion with which all these [Twitter] interactions take place, certain topics man- age to get an inordinate amount of attention, thus bubbling to the top in terms of popularity and contributing to new trends and to the public agenda of the community. How this happens in a world where crowdsourcing dominates is still an unresolved problem, but there is considerable consensus on the fact that two aspects of information transmission seem to be important in determining which content receives inordinate amounts of attention."

The top 10 most influential Twitter users are:

Zero percent of people said they would pay to use Twitter, according to a study by the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Forty-nine percent of Internet users surveyed said they have used free online micro-blogging services such as Twitter, but when asked if they would pay to use Twitter, not one person said they would, according to the study, released Friday.

"Such an extreme finding that produced a zero response underscores the difficulty of getting Internet users to pay for anything that they already receive for free," stated Jeffrey I. Cole, director of the center at USC. "Twitter has no plans to charge its users, but this result illustrates, beyond any doubt, the tremendous problem of transforming free users into paying users ... Online providers face major challenges to get customers to pay for services they now receive for free."

The study also found that Internet users don't really care for online ads, either.

Seventy percent said online advertising is "annoying," and 50 percent of the users never click on Web ads. However, ads are the lesser of two evils, with 55 percent saying they would rather see online ads than pay for content.