Teenagers, that valuable and highly sought demographic, might not be the über-users of the Web that most of us thought they were, at least according to a recent Pew Internet study. The fact is that teens are ignoring Twitter, forgetting their blogs and aggregating around social networking sites.
While 73% of teens are members of social networking sites, the study found that:
- Only 8% use Twitter.
- Only 14% blog, compared to 28% in 2006.
Even their activity on these sites is shifting from just a year ago. For instance:
- Not only do they blog less, they are less likely to leave a comment on a blog.
- They are less likely to send group or private messages.
Some social-media commentators have noted there’s a tendency towards brevity, and away from substantial content creation. They note that teenagers still post images and comment on them, send IMs and text messages, and leave notes on each other’s walls – all ways of socializing that don’t involve significant effort.
Lacking any real insight, I’ll throw in my two cents’ worth of conjecture here. Teenagers, almost all of whom were born after the introduction of the first Web browser, are the true Internet generation. Like television and radio, the Internet is an appliance or a utility to them. They don’t crack it open, hack it or tweak it. (That was the role of the early adopters who are now the tech-savvy, device-hungry young adults of today.) They take it for granted.
Social networking sites aggregate all the functionality a young user needs. With apologies to Albert Einstein, these sites make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.
Mind you, it could also be that teenagers are turning away from socializing via computer and more towards texting on mobile phones. (Did you know that 58% of 12-year-olds have mobile phones? This from the same Pew study.)
So what do you think? Is this shift a significant trend? Or are teenagers finding other ways to socialize? Let me know what you think in the comments below.
I recently gave a talk on social media to a group of public relation students. Knowing most in the group were leaving their teenage years, I skipped explaining what social media was and instead jumped right into how it could be used to leverage a brand. Yet at the end of the presentation, a young woman asked, quite frankly, “What exactly is the point of Facebook? I don’t get it.” It was here that I experienced first hand what you, Mo, are referring to.
Perhaps because most of us (those in the marketing communications field) were around at the inception of social media, our fascination with the new medium prompted us to strive to understand everything about it. Yet in my opinion (and in line with Mo’s), teenagers don’t yet ‘get it’ because they take it for granted. Perhaps because they weren’t really around before its existence, they probably don’t really see what the big deal is. From what I’ve seen, it is indeed the use of mobile devices – texting, specifically – that has created the real buzz in their world (with mobile technology already being leveraged by marketers).
In my opinion, when it comes to social media and young people, just give it time. We, as communication professionals, flocked to social media out of curiosity, but stayed for the party. They’ll do the same.
Here’s what I notice about my kids and their friends when it comes to media use: they love YouTube and news to them is what’s being featured there; they watch TV and music videos using streaming websites ’cause they can take their laptop and wifi anywhere (don’t like being tied down – hence no landlines when cellphones will do); a few blog and love it when its about their passion but not many (an exception is new parents who create blogs specifically for their offspring and to upload a million pictures a day); Facebook and MSN are their social sites – Facebook especially for updating your status. They sleep with their phone beside them; and eat with it on the table, for text messaging and PINGing. PCs (the big ones with the screens and hard drive power) are good for applying for jobs on-line and playing on-line team games.
I’ve been watching how my two sons use our laptops and what I’ve seen is pretty similar to your experience, Jill. YouTube is huge with them.
They attend a Francophone school and the catchment area is huge. Because their friends are scattered across the city, they can’t run to their friends’ houses to play and socialize. So they’ve replaced “face time” with screen time, texting via Facebook and chatting via Skype.
For my part, I just got my first smartphone and I can see how compelling mobile social media can be. Writing a blog post is hard work (at least for me) but writing a little blurb while I’m on the go seems natural.