A former teen’s take on Teens and Twitter

Posted by Bhavishya Kanjhan on Jul 13, 2009 in Default | 1 comment

A report by Matthew Robson – Morgan Stanley’s 15 year old intern – has got a lot of people paying attention as it presents “inside”  information on trends, some of which has turned conventional belief on its head. One part of it says teens aren’t using Twitter because they believe no one is reading their tweets. 16 year old Daniel Brusilovsky over at TechCrunch one ups Robson’s post and says teens are also afraid that Twitter isn’t ‘safe’ (when compared to Facebook) and that texting is expensive. Pfft, what about the public MySpace profile which were and still are quite the rage among teens.

A comment on TechCrunch’s post by James Stern reasons teens avoiding Twitter as “teens don’t care about news, they want to talk to friends and see and comment on their pictures, and Myspace and facebook are better for that.”

James has got it spot on. while it’s true that Twitter is more what you make of it, it is most definitely less of a Social Network than it is a micro-blogging /link sharing / information sharing platform.

For a lot of the first time users, the update box is seen as something to update their ‘status’ – a mindset users carry over from Facebook , which we know teens enjoy and love. Ironically the update box on Facebook has moved away from only status to allow sharing and distribution online – a la Twitter.

But the reason Twitter does well with teens is because they don’t care about networking – the act of creating/extending a network – as much as they do in their existing network itself. They would rather talk/share with their existing network rather than with unknown or “random” people on the internet.

Your average teen doesn’t care about real time search or news. In fact, the way Twitter has been pushed into the mainstream could be one of the factors pushing teens away from Twitter. Simply put, the utility that the mature users of Twitter have derived from it does not appeal to the teen segment.

That being said, it isn’t necessarily a bad thing that the adoption of Twitter among teens is low. Not everything new and exciting needs to be approved by that segment. Maybe it’s okay if Twitter isn’t as “hip” as it is resourceful.