Do Teens Really Tweet?
NEIRAD enilno edition
You’ve all seen them in the hallways of DHS, standing near windows or going into the courtyard to get reception for text messages. When adults see teens partaking in such activities, most jokingly assume that they must be mundanely updating their Twitter account with pointless information about their boring lives. It is the constant stereotype in the media that he majority of young people use Twitter.com. The supposition could not be further from the truth.
The majority of Twitter users are between the ages of 45-54. The next most popular Twitter user category is tweeters ranging from ages 25-34. These numbers support a New York Times statistic that the, “use of social networking by people aged 35 to 54 grew to 60 percent in the last year.”
Even in these age groups, most people who sign up for a Twitter account don’t return to the site. Nielsen.com found “more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent.”
DHS students contribute to this churn rate. Junior Olivia Taylor has a Twitter account, and said, “I started my account to stalk celebrities, but now I don’t use it because it’s just boring.”
But why does it seem adults have taken over this social networking site? Social media analyst Jeremiah Owyang told The New York Times, “adults are just catching up to what teens have been doing for years.” Young adults and adults who joined Twitter when it first started in 2006 are growing up with the Web site, and its demographic will continue to change as well.
Twitter seems to have evolved from a place to share what’s on one’s mind to the place where celebrities can share pointless “news” or post juicy gossip for fans. USA Today says, “Pear Analytics categorized 811 out of 2,000 random tweets over two weeks as babble. It categorized 751 (38%) as conversational, 174 (9%) as moderately interesting and 117 (6%) as self-promotional. Spam accounted for only 4%, or 75, of the tweets.”
The teens, who most people think are the ones updating Twitter are instead focusing on other social networks, particularly Facebook. Most teens say what is on their mind on other people’s “walls” or in their status updates on Facebook.
Junior Bethany Turner has both Twitter and Facebook accounts, but rarely tweets, saying, “I don’t use Twitter because I think it’s pointless. I only started the account because my friend told me to.”
With all the recent hype about teens getting into trouble from carelessly using Twitter or other social networking sites, it is easy for the media to assume that they are the ones keeping the Web sites alive with constant, pointless tweets. But we need to look closer at who is really sustaining this relentless self promotion on Twitter. And very few can be found in the hallways of high schools.
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