14 DAY TRIAL // There's been a recurring theme relating to Twitter lately, with many asking or attempting to answer “why teens don't tweet.” Geoff Cook, cofounder and CEO of social networking site myYearbook, set out to find a definitive answer surveying more than 10,000 teens between 13 and 17 years old and the conclusion was not totally unexpected. It turns out that teens tweet or don't tweet just as much as the rest of us and, for the most part, Facebook is just a better alternative.
The idea that teens don't really like Twitter that much has been gaining stream for months but has only started to become ingrained in the public mind after a Nielsen report from a 15-year-old intern at the research firm. The study in the UK, while hardly scientific, found that teenagers just don't have much use for the service, with much better alternatives for their needs like Facebook.
Other studies since then have come to support this notion, making it almost a given. The numbers would seem to back up that claim as well, as teens make up only 11 percent of Twitter's population. While this may seem like a small number, Facebook's teen population makes up only 9 percent of its overall user base, this despite most teens preferring Facebook over Twitter and over pretty much anything else.
Besides the fact that teens make up a small percentage of the site's population, another figure that would indicate that they aren't that keen on Twitter is the fact that, overall, most of them don't actually tweet. But, seeing as this is also true for the vast majority of the population and, in fact, the teenagers who do use the microblogging service are more engaged than other age groups, this doesn't seem to be an issue either.
At first, the results of myYearbook's study, published in a guest post over at TechCrunch, seemed to back up all of the previous claims. Of the ones who would actually sing up for the service, 45 percent didn't actually use it very often and 17 percent didn't send out even a tweet. However, some usual suspects for the teenagers' lack of interest like the cost associated with SMSs or the fact that “it's too open” or “it's not safe” were found to be a non-issue for most teens.
So the study then set out to find out what the teens that were on Twitter were using it for. The top reasons were updating their status, keeping up with favorite bands or musicians, keeping up with current events and connecting with their friends. With these results the study concludes that the reason why most teenagers don't use Twitter is because their needs are better served by other services, most notably Facebook, and that the microblogging service really doesn't bring anything new for them.
“The question of “Why Don’t Teens Use Twitter?” is the question of “Why Doesn’t Everyone Use Twitter?” The answer, it would seem, is both obvious and heretical … maybe Twitter isn’t for everyone,” Geoff Cook concludes.