Teens don’t use Twitter because Facebook still rules
Twitter has proved, and is still proving, very popular. This year has seen the social networking/micro-blogging site get more attention than any site I’ve seen since the dot-com bubble floated away. And yet, it seems teens really aren’t interested in tweeting. Why is this?
I’ve been around for quite some years now and seen Web sites come and go. Many manage to build huge buzz in their early days but most fail to live up to the hype. But Twitter is different. It’s taken a while for it to fully blossom and most analysts still think it hasn’t yet reached its full potential. Just this weekend Robert Scoble suggested Twitter has actually been underhyped and is worth between $5 and $10 billion.
However, despite these claims and many others like them, it seems teenagers as a group of people aren’t tweeting on a huge scale. This has tried to be explained away by a number of different reasons: they don’t understand the concept, they have nothing to say, they don’t feel safe, etc etc. But TechCrunch decided to do its own study to find out why teens don’t tweet.
Geoff Cook of myYearbook explains how they recently surveyed 10,000 U.S. teenagers aged between 13 and 17. It appears that many of the assumptions made about teenagers using Twitter are flawed to begin with. Twitter actually has a higher percentage of teenagers (11 percent) than Facebook does (9 percent). So it seems the data has been misrepresented and twisted up to now.
There are however some interesting stats when it comes to teens’ use of Twitter. 45 percent of teens who have a Twitter account don’t tweet, and 17 percent never have. As to why they don’t, the majority of respondents claimed it’s because “It’s lame.” Which is pretty self-explanatory and to the point.
Then comes the killer question of why those teens who do use Twitter do so. The main reasons given – status updates, keeping up with celebrities, keeping up with the news, keeping up with friends – are all things that can be done on other social networks, notably Facebook and MySpace.
It’s not like teenagers are going against the grain here, it’s just that Twitter isn’t particularly necessary for ordinary people when there are other alternatives already out there. Which suggests Twitter needs to make more effort to find its own niche to truly go mainstream.
That niche is being created by the users themselves, with Twitter becoming a bang up to the minute news outlet and way for businesses to connect with their customers. Neither of which would really interest your average teenager.
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August 31st, 2009
Twitter and Facebook both suck just like MySpace which i have. But i don’t care nor do i use that lame site. Again Twitter and Facebook both are garbage.