Why Don’t Teens Tweet? We Asked 10,000+ of Them.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/30/why-dont-teens-tweet-we-asked-over-10000-of-them/

by cwan • 17 years ago

28 19 17 years ago

dennmart• 17 years ago

Finally someone did a little research on this topic. I don't know why this topic is that big of a deal anyway. I know that when I was between the ages of 12 and 17, my attention would be all over the place. If Twitter existed back then, I probably would've used it a week, then went on to something else the rest of the cool kids were using.

The pie charts are somewhat confusing, though. Sometimes blue meant 'No', and other times it meant 'Yes'. Some consistency would've gone a long way.

smokinn• 17 years ago

It blew up because so many people use twitter as a way to "market their personal brand" and other such delusions so when they heard that maybe their vast amounts of time spent on twitter weren't as "valuable" as they thought they freaked out.

foulmouthboy• 17 years ago

I'm so glad somebody actually did some research into this. The original "study" of one 15 year old Morgan Stanley intern (writing about his circle of friends) should never have been taken as seriously as it was.

SamAtt• 17 years ago

I'm not sure this should be taken much more seriously. This is a survey of MyYearbook.com users which right there makes it more biased towards those who would use a service like Twitter. Beyond that we have no real idea of how the numbers break down.

They give some statistics on their user demographics at the end of the post but they seem irrelevant to me. Since they're a service geared exclusively to teens with 3.2 million or so uniques per month (according to compete) yet the survey only got 20,000 results. How do we know all those results weren't from the midwest (for example)?

IMHO, a survey of 20,000 unknown quantities isn't any more helpful than a survey of one 15 year old and his circle of friends.

makmanalp• 17 years ago

The first four reasons why they don't use twitter give some insight:

1) It's lame 2) My friends don't use it 3) I don't understand it 4) It doesn't help me do anything

The rest of the reasons are less than 15%.

hughprime• 17 years ago

Pretty sensible reasons there.

I can't see much point in a teenager using twitter. Teenagers spend every weekday at the same school as most of their friends anyway, and at any given time their friends are doing pretty much the same thing they are. "Sitting in class. Bored."

It's only when you get older and your friends get a bit more diverse and spread out and more likely to be engaging in interesting activities that twitter becomes less dull.

Estragon• 17 years ago

These are the reasons I don't use it. Until now, my near total incomprehension of the phenomenon was making me feel old...

kiba• 17 years ago

As a teenager crossing into the adult twilight zone, I mostly used twitter to do:

1. What the heck are certain developers coding?

2. Shorthand "RSS" of content update

3. Keep up with cool startups/projects

4. A microblog for my game projects.

Using it as to keep up with what friends are doing or update what the heck I am doing for my life atm? Banal and boring. I would not use it like that.

mahmud• 17 years ago

FWIW, the "researcher" runs an also-ran social network and paints itself as a twitter-competitor.

Twitter, Myspace, MyYearBook and Facebook: those are the four "social networks" he compares. One of them, you probably have never heard of (and by "coincidence", its name is a portmanteau of the names of two other networks.)

hristov2• 17 years ago

Yes, and notice the first chart in his article. It has bars for Twitter, facebook, myspace and myyearbook, and surprise surprise his unknown company sports the highest bar.

Good job myyearbook! Way to get that 25% share of teenagers. So let me guess you have 4 members and one of them is a teenager. Your younger brother perhaps?

maukdaddy• 17 years ago

Also note the ridiculously loaded questions.

bbuffone• 17 years ago

The survey seems to make sense. Twitter is a business (market communication) and media tool. Celbs use it for MarCom, most individuals do. With most local tv, radio and network news shows having accounts, if I was a kid why would I Think I need this? The answer is they don't unless they want to play along with "#itaintcheatingif" kind of crap that is always top on the trends.

I am not sure why there is so much interest in this topic. Twitter doesn't make money the people that use Twitter really don't make money; having more people follow Miley Cyrus isn't going to change that.

huhtenberg• 17 years ago

Feel free to downmod, but

  (TC + Twitter) = (Don't Care)

I would rather have Arrington to own shares of some Erlang product company. At the very least this wave of forced publicity would've been more relevant to HN.

tlrobinson• 17 years ago

HN member complaining about how they don't care about TechCrunch and/or Twitter = don't care.

Seriously, every submission about Twitter has a comment like this. Move on.

Deadsunrise• 17 years ago

My brain hurts after seeing those piecharts, "Yes" in red and "No" in Blue. I had to check the legend twice to make sense of them (and still seems counter-intuitive)

hristov2• 17 years ago

OMG, Twitter has to have the best fricking marketing people in the universe. Just look at the title. It's like it is expected or assumed that everyone has to be on Twitter and the fact that teenagers are not on it is some troubling problem or some curious aberation. It sounds like "why don't teens exercise."

I don't know, maybe teens don't tweet for the same reason I do not tweet. Maybe they have never actually felt the need to tweet.

0ffworlder• 17 years ago

I don't know anyone with a twitter account. When I was a teenager (2 years ago heh) all I used was msn/irc. Facebook/gmail chat seems to be a bit more popular among the kiddes these days though.

litewulf• 17 years ago

Geography plays a strong role as well. In the US AIM is super popular (until it was supplanted by gchat in my clique). European friends used to use ICQ (long ago), and I think MSN has been generally popular in Asia forever.

GVRV• 17 years ago

Pretty sure that if teens didn't tweet, Jonas brothers wouldn't be trending multiple times a day.

Why Don’t Teens Tweet? We Asked 10,000+ of Them.

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