Twitter, schmitter
A few weeks back, I suggested to a colleague that Twitter wasn’t the Internet phenomenon many folks think it is. Why? Because my kids could care less about it.
Granted, my kids are on the older side, but the youngest — at 16 — can’t be bothered with tweeting. My older kids feel the same. They view it as a platform for politicians, social activists and commercial interests, all intent on selling their audience something. From ideas to shoes, Twitter is the place to go for customers.
It’s a place where folks try to influence the bigger world. Sell or be sold to, that’s the Twitter game.
And young folks aren’t interested.
Now there’s a professional study that bears out what I observed in my own family. Young people aren’t much interested in Twitter.
The study, by the Pew Research Center, found that:
Teens are not using Twitter in large numbers. While teens are bigger users of almost all other online applications, Twitter is an exception.
- 8% of internet users ages 12-17 use Twitter. This makes Twitter as common among teens as visiting a virtual world, and far less common than sending or receiving text messages as 66% of teens do, or going online for news and political information, done by 62% of online teens.
- Older teens are more likely to use Twitter than their younger counterparts; 10% of online teens ages 14-17 do so, compared with 5% of those ages 12-13.
- High school age girls are particularly likely to use Twitter. Thirteen percent of online girls ages 14-17 use Twitter, compared with 7% of boys that age.
- Using different wording, we find that 19% of adult internet users use Twitter or similar services to post short status updates and view the updates of others online.
- Young adults lead the way when it comes to using Twitter or status updating. One-third of online 18-29 year-olds post or read status updates.
It appears from the study that teens are much more interested in connecting directly with other people (their use of applications like Facebook and MySpace far exceeds that of adults) than with companies or organizations.
The lesson for folks who want to reach kids: You’ll have to figure out how to do it through their friends or peers, not with anonymous blasts into the blogosphere.
