5 theories about why young folks don’t know Twitter

December 2, 2008 by Kurt
Filed under: twitter 

In the past three weeks, I’ve spoken to two college journalism classes. In both, I asked about Twitter. In both, I got a room full of blank stares. None of the students in either class was on Twitter. They didn’t know anyone who was. And most of them had never even heard of it.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who has experienced it. This Readership Institute item relates a similar anecdote — with a somewhat larger sampling of students than mine (Thank you, Stephanie Romanski). It also references a Time magazine item in August that outlined the typical Twitter user’s demos. The story says, “Today the site’s largest age demographic is 35-to-44-year-olds, who make up 25.9% of its users.” (Thanks to Chrys Wu for the reminder on that story.)

When I showed Twitter to my two classes, and described how it could be used to keep in touch, hear about breaking news, and experience the real-time “Best Week Ever” phenomenon, they all seemed to catch on pretty quickly. I give them credit for that. I was a Twitter lurker for months before it clicked for me.

So why am I on the fringe of Twitter’s sweet spot — and the kids aren’t anywhere near it? I’ve got a few theories.

1) College students have all the social networking they need — in the real world. One of the beauties of Twitter is its ability to connect folks casually and spread the word when stuff happens. College students have roommates and classmates around them all the time. They don’t need another way to spread the news.

2) They don’t get it. Yeah, this is a lame theory. My daughter’s impression is that it’s invasive, even though you reveal only what you want to reveal. When I mused about this on Twitter, I got a huge response from my followers. Steve Outing has the same experience with his teen: “She can’t see why Twitter is for her. But otherwise a total social network addict.” Craig Kanalley, a grad student at DePaul in Chicago, responded, “Honestly, it’s not that big among college students for some reason; I’ve found most of my peers don’t know about it either.”

3) They aren’t as cool as we’d like to think they are. Hey, the cool kids are on Twitter. They’re not on Twitter. They must not be cool!

4) Twitter isn’t as cool as we’d like to think it is. This is probably more likely. This New York Times story on Twitter notes that 3 million people have tried the service. On Planet Earth.

5) They don’t want an intermediary between their phones. Most college students are born knowing how to text with their phones. Texting among themselves serves them just fine.

OK. It’s charitable to refer to them as theories. Speculation might be better. Maybe I should just be happy to be one of the cool kids. For a change.

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Comments

  • Interesting post. I just assumed all the cool kids were on Twitter.
  • jeremy
    I sort of like the fact all of these young kids aren't on Twitter. Each social network has a very unique demographic behind it. The MySpace crowd is much different than the facebook crowd -- which is a lot different than the Twitter crowd, which is even different than the artsy fartsy Flickr crowd. It's kind of nice to have that separation, so you can know what to expect from each one. If I need to see what's up with my teenie bopper cousins, I'll hit up myspace. Facebook will tune me in to the college folks, and twitter keeps me up to date with the laid-off journos.
  • Speaking as a college student, I find a lot of people my age don't want to experiment with social networks.

    Sure, we have Facebook/MySpace — and those are common. Yet I find few people who have Flickr/Google accounts. Even fewer have blogs that aren't notes or bulletins on Facebook and MySpace.

    I figured things would be slightly different when I transferred to Temple University. They are, dramatically so, and yet there still isn't that much use of Twitter et al.

    This is sort of a basis of No. 3, but I figure background was needed. College students are just like the rest of the population when dealing with adoption.

    The difference is college students are placed on a different portion of the "time to adopt graph" — just before the rest of the population.
  • You're very much a cool kid, Kurt. College kids don't twitter because they don't need outside information from other groups, like working adults do.

    Facebook has twitter type functions in updates and notes, but it's clutter, not the central focus.

    Twitter is mass texting, and it works because we don't have time to call everyone in our network and tell them what we're doing and ask for help.

    College kids have that time.
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