So are we, or are we not, the Twitter capital of the United States?

Two recently released studies make conflicting claims. A report released by Men's Health magazine claimed that Utah is the fastest-growing Twitter state in the country, while a Washington D.C. communications firm, DCI Group, ranked Utah dead last in Twitter usage.

It's not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison, but the contrasting data underscores the difficulty of pinpointing the popularity of social media on the Internet.

"I would imagine we would be fairly competitive," said Evin Catlett, social media director at Richter 7, the Salt Lake City advertising agency. "We have a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of tech companies. We have a lot of startups here. It would surprise me if we rank that low."

The Men's Health study ranked Salt Lake City as the 10th most socially networked city in the country, in part based on Twitter usage. That's in contrast to DCI Group's report, which considered the number of profiles from a Twitter Yellow Pages service, Twellow.com, and compared with 2010 census figures.

That study claims only some .35 percent of Utahns use Twitter, while the state ranked 10th in the country in Facebook activity. One potential problem with the DCI data is Twellow.com has profiles of just over 30 million Twitter accounts, when there are more than 200 million Twitter accounts worldwide.

The study is based on the only Twitter data available, not necessarily "reliable" data, said Julie Germany, DCI's vice president for digital strategy. "They [Twellow.com] were the most accessible at the time we were aggregating the data," she said. "We do see this [study] as a work in progress."

Neither Facebook nor Twitter provide statistics of how many members belong to each service in each state, Germany said.

In addition, DCI's study flies directly in the face of a study released last January from Internet marketing firm HubSpot, which says Utah experienced a 66 percent increase in Twitter usage in 2010, more than any state in the country. That study is based on the company's own Internet tool, Twitter Grader, which calculate's a person's Twitter profile against millions of other users.

The problem with tracking social media usage by state is the fact that when a person signs up for Facebook or Twitter, they don't have to list the state in which they live. That means there could be millions of users who aren't geographically catalogued, said Catlett, the Utah advertising official.

"None of them [firms that try to track Twitter activity by state] can ever pull all of the data," she said. "But I'm in the camp that I think that Utah is a very social-savvy state. If you look at how prevalent Twitter is in our community and in our government and our sports teams, looking at how active our ski resorts are on Twitter, the Utah population is more accustomed to using it."

vince@sltrib.com. Twitter: twitter.com/ohmytech.