Teens not so keen on Twitter?

This morning a colleague of mine shared a news story with me whose title reads: “Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens”.

Seems like teenagers are not yet prepared to make the best use out of Twitter, in fact, according to comScore only 11% of teenagers aged 12 to 17 use Twitter. Truth is, Twitter shouldn’t take it personal at all. An 18 year old girl made a couple statements with regards to the leading microblogging site which paints a clearer picture us.

“I just think it’s weird and I don’t feel like everyone needs to know what I’m doing every second of my life,” she declared.

The traditional early-adopter model, as comScore explains, consists mainly on students or teenagers as those who are most likely to drive  the popularity of social networks. Apparently, this was not the case for Twitter. Instead, a whole new different demographic was what contributed to Twitter’s growth. One made up of ‘adults who might have not had the chance to use other social sites before’, Jeremiah Owyang explained, ‘adults are just catching up to what teens have been doing for years.’

NYT’s reasoning behind this tendency makes a lot of sense and I have to agree with it. Teenagers and young adolescents are more friend focused and not so computer focused, in the sense that, if they want to communicate or share something with their friends, they do it over the phone or by text messages, without thinking twice about it. It’s more personal.

Plus, they might not be interested in broadcasting what they’re up to and talk openly about their issues or ideas infront of millions of people– including their parents. And this brings us to another reason why teenagers may not be that into Twitter. Most parents won’t allow them to chat online, specially if they are prone to interact with strangers on the Web.

Do you remember Matthew Robson, the 15 year old kid who did that internship chez Morgan Stanley, and the facts he revealed concerning Twitter? He actually summed things up pretty well. He was one of the first to bare the ‘truth’ about the microblogging site by saying that it was for ‘old people’.

“Teenagers do not use Twitter,” he wrote. “Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they realise that they are not going to update it (mostly because texting Twitter uses up credit, and they would rather text friends with that credit). They realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless.”

Let this be a good lesson for advertisers and marketers in that it offers more of a realistic panorama of who uses what type social media and for what purposes. Great facts to keep in mind before planning your next online communication strategy.

(thanks for the heads up, Kim!)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 at 6:25 pm and is filed under Social Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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