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August 11, 2009, 03:00 PM ET

'Teens Don't Tweet'

Is your college Twittering to reach potential students?

They're not listening.

That, anyway, is one conclusion you could be tempted to draw from the headline on a new piece of research. “Teens Don't Tweet; Twitter's Growth Not Fueled By Youth,” the Nielsen Company reported in a finding picked up by Mashable.

The figures fit with what Tanya M. Joosten, a lecturer in the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee's department of communication who tweeted about the new numbers, found in a survey of her own students.

“I think most of the students don’t even know what Twitter is, under the age of 25,” Ms. Joosten said in an interview Tuesday. “There’s been no reason for them to be introduced to it.”

Nielsen based its claim on data from a panel of 250,000 U.S. Internet users. People under 25 make up “nearly one quarter of the active U.S. Internet universe,” but in June of 2009 that age bracket accounted for just 16 percent of Twitter.com Web-site users, the market-research firm reported.

Also, more than 90 percent of the audience for TweetDeck, a popular application for browsing the micro-blogging service, is over 25.

The numbers could be sobering news for the bevy of higher-ed admissions and marketing types tipsy with promotional tweets.

Or not.

Teens rallied online to demonstrate their Twitter-fides. Don't tweet? Oh yeah?

"Then how are the Teen Choice Awards the top trending topic?” pointed out one of many incredulous Twitterers. “Put that in your pipe and smoke it!”

From a more analytical perspective, Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, deconstructed the teens-don't-tweet finding in a thoughtful blog post. Her take: The methodology is questionable. The data presentation is “misleading.”

Still, when Ms. Joosten surveyed students in an upper-level undergraduate communication course at Milwaukee, her tiny snapshot found that over 80 percent of them didn't Twitter.

Traditional-age college students or high-school students are focused on staying connected with friends, said Ms. Joosten, who is also a learning-technology consultant at Milwaukee. They do that through text messaging and Facebook, which allows them to find people based on schools.

Who needs Twitter?

“Twitter is definitely about having a broadcast medium to the general population,” she said. “I don’t think that’s Facebook. And I don't think people under the age of 25 have any interest in broadcasting beyond their friends. But I think once you get older, beyond 25, I think people’s social circles become limited, and they reach out to things like Twitter to stay connected to the world and meet new people with similar interests.”

She added, “A lot of campuses are reaching out to communication technologies that are Web 2.0 just to sort of jump on that bandwagon, without too much data about how effective the medium is."

So are all those marketing and admissions tweets for naught?

Not necessarily.

“We’re attracting older students these days that are looking for a place to connect,” Ms. Joosten said. “So if campuses are trying to connect with, let’s say, the 25-and-older crowd, then yes, Twitter is a very good marketing tool."

Categories: Student-Life, Social-Networking

Comments

1. mhward - August 11, 2009 at 05:21 pm

Danah Boyd has comprehensively debunked this study:http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/08/06/teens_dont_twee.html

2. timmassie - August 11, 2009 at 05:22 pm

It's OK if people under 25 don't know what Twitter is. That means my students, who have to open Twitter accounts as part of my senior-level communications class, will be ahead of the competition in the job search game. One of my students, who graduated in May, was hired for a great PR/marketing position in Manhattan because he was the only applicant who had an active Twitter account. So, I guess it's true that those under 25 aren't into Twitter. My advice? Stay away so my students can take those jobs. Tim Massie Chief Public Affairs Officer and Adjunct Professor Marist College On Twitter @tcmassie

3. morgahl - August 11, 2009 at 06:22 pm

"One of my students ... was hired for a great PR/marketing position in Manhattan because he was the only applicant who had an active Twitter account." A couple of questions: 1. What do you mean by "great"? 2. Does it really take a college education to open and keep active a Twitter account? BTW, anyone out there in PR or marketing, I have an active Hotmail account if you're interested.

4. cronknews - August 11, 2009 at 10:38 pm

It appears that "many" or "most" in this article should be interpreted as "all." Yes, let's ignore that gazillion who DO use Twitter, who MIGHT want quick access to news, who COULD benefit from exploring the medium. I know many bureaucrats who will rejoice at this newfound permission to keep fearing tech change. -CronkNews.com

5. cronknews - August 11, 2009 at 10:40 pm

p.s. We're not afraid to grovel for subscribers to our own new Twitter page: http://www.twitter.com/cronknews. Come on over, geezers!

6. tjfarrel - August 12, 2009 at 07:21 am

Despite the fact that Boyd explicitly chooses to report the "most salient visceral reaction that I got when looking at the teens' Twitter streams," that post is--insofar as anything written about a medium that works so instantaneously can be--"a thoughtful blog post." But it doesn't deconstruct anything: doesn't want to, doesn't try to, doesn't pretend to. It is good, straighforward analysis. Deconstruction is a different thing. On a separate question, is it really so hard to note that "Well, I twitter" is a pretty meaningless response to a study of the behavior patterns of millions of people?

7. finstrat - August 12, 2009 at 10:18 am

Regardless of your feelings on the validity of Boyd's initial responses to the study in his "thoughtful blog post," this statement should be enough to halt the discussion: "Mashable presented this report completely inaccurately. First off, Nielsen is measuring 2-24. My guess is that there are a lot more 24-year-olds on Twitter than 2-year-olds. ...the Nielsen data tells us nothing about teens. We don't know if young adults (20-24) are all of those numbers or not. If all 16% of those under 24 on Twitter were teens, teens would be WAY over-represented in proportion to their demographic size." I think what happened here was that Marc Parry (or his editor) saw the initial Nielsen results on Mashable, jumped at the chance to write something provocative about a major social phenomenon, and didn't dig as deeply into the data as he should have.

8. finstrat - August 12, 2009 at 10:31 am

More importantly, Chris O'Brien (www.mercurynews.com/chris_obrien) points out what should have caught our attention while everyone was busy reorienting themselves into a world where teens don't tweet: "Actually, I think in many ways your post and the Mashable report both seem to miss the point. The numbers themselves for teens on twitter aren't that interesting. Instead, the real story here has been that in the rapid growth of Twitter, teens and young adults have not lead the way. Even if you presume that they're on Twitter in numbers proportional to their percentage of the population, that doesn't change the fact that Twitter's popularity has been fueled by folks over 35. That goes against the conventional wisdom that it's teens and young adults who tend to be early adopters."

9. svencole - August 12, 2009 at 11:45 am

Not everyone reads every newspaper we send releases to, not everyone reponds to each piece of collateral we produce, not everyone reponds to our website- Twitter is another piece of the puzzle and is one that is quick and easy and also serves as a great tool to push content to other platforms.

10. dallasm12 - August 12, 2009 at 12:41 pm

How about using Twitter as a direct response system in Universities instead of charging $50 for a clicker? http://bit.ly/GhHtA Don't worry. The trickle down effect will reach the youth as well. It's more about the platform than the application.

11. eelalien - August 12, 2009 at 03:24 pm

Teens don't twitter 'cuz old farts think it's cool... 'nuff said!

12. mhward - August 12, 2009 at 07:19 pm

Thank you tjfarrel. I didn't say deconstructed;. I said debunked. Which she did.

13. ossman2013 - August 13, 2009 at 12:21 am

Well, I'm a teenager, and I tweet. It's a matter of opinion. I know several other teens who tweet. There are more grown folks on Twitter, though.

14. laoshi - September 19, 2009 at 12:22 pm

I'm 45, and find Twitter absolutely useless.