Kiwis tweet more than eagles

Tweeting is gathering steam in New Zealand with the percentage of Kiwis using Twitter apparently outstripping the percentage of America's population doing so.

The inaugural Attitude New Zealand report, compiled by market research company Perceptive, says 6 percent of New Zealanders regularly tweet, exceeding the 5 percent of the much larger US population that use Twitter.

Twitter is a social networking tool that allows users to send short text messages, called tweets, to others on their networks.

Perceptive says the rising use of Twitter is in line with New Zealand's growing acceptance of social media as an every day means of communicating both socially, and increasingly, for business reasons too.

Perceptive says its survey of 1000 New Zealanders aged between 15 and 65 showed 58 percent use Facebook, 18 percent use Bebo, 7 percent use MySpace and 3 percent use LinkedIn. And 88 percent said blogs, streaming video, podcasting and social platforms were here to stay.

The survey also found 83 percent of people used online banking to check balances or pay bills while 72 percent regularly shopped online.

TradeMe was the the favourite website of 20 percent of respondents, followed by Google and Facebook at 10 percent each. Stuff.co.nz, the NZ Herald and YouTube were next with 3 percent each. Trade Me and Stuff are owned by BusinessDay publisher Fairfax Media.

Those surveyed had annual incomes ranging from below $20,000 to more than $100,000.