Only 16% of U.S. adults use Twitter (but they’re smart, young, and rich)

Only 16 percent of U.S. adults use Twitter, and only half of them get news via the short-message social network, according to a new survey by Pew Research Center. That’s far fewer than Facebook, where 30 percent of American adults get their news.

The good news for Twitter?

Twitter users skew younger, more educated, more mobile, and more wealthy. Oh, and they’re more male too, than Facebook users.

Twitter users are more likely to make more than $75,000 a year than Facebook users — 48 percent to 41 percent — and also more likely to be male: 50 percent versus Facebook’s 42 percent. Those facts may, of course, be related, as men tend to earn more than women even to this day. In addition, Twitter users are more likely to be young, with 45 percent of them between 18 and 29 years of age, versus 34 percent of Facebook users, and more likely to be better educated, with at least 40 percent of them earning a Bachelor’s degree or more, versus 30 percent for Facebook.

Still, with all that good news for a dream advertisers’ demographic, it’s hard to get around that one core glaring statistic: Only a small slice of American’s actually use the social media darling of the now.

This is not new news, of course.

77 percent of Twitter’s users are outside the United States, as we learned from its IPO documentation, and the company has massive penetration among the young, mobile-savvy populations of many developing nations. The only problem is that they bring in much less revenue than American, Canadian, and western European users.

The problem is that Twitter’s user growth has essentially stalled in the U.S. That’s something the company needs to fix, and quickly, as it goes public — and after.