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Why Teens Just Aren’t That Into Twitter

It comes down to rewards and expectations.  Teens and adults each bring a different set of needs and desires into the social space and each expects to receive something different out of it.  The idea of “social currency” and practices like “friend or follower fishing” all speak to a desire for social validation.  The difference is in terms of how that social validation is delivered.

Though at first glance, both platforms provide roughly equivalent forms of social metrics, Facebook tracks “friends” while Twitter users accumulate “followers.”  Both are nice measurements of the size of a user’s social footprint. But the similarities end there.

As our President famously opined during the election season: “words matter.”  The distinction between “friends” and “followers” is more than merely semantic.  In each community, users are expected to engage in vastly different interactions with their social peers.

Facebook is designed to facilitate a series of relatively complex interpersonal interactions.  Online chat, personal messaging, photo sharing, social applications, and content sharing.  Furthermore, most or all features, even the Twitter-like ones like the newsfeed or status updates, are designed to facilitate conversation through prominent calls to jump in and threaded views.

Compare this with the relatively straightforward design of Twitter.  Twitter’s interface is certainly adept at content linking, but is not well suited to more complicated exchanges.  The inability to view other’s conversations, or even your own, with a sense of time or continuity hampers the ability to communicate in real or near-real time.  Instead, users are encouraged to follow and accumulate followers that they can broadcast their thoughts out to.  Followers are merely expected to listen and, ideally, retweet (or parrot) the voice of the speaker.

In other words, Facebook is about conversing, Twitter is more about broadcasting.  This was the same conclusion reached by the Harvard Business School when they examined which users were responsible for the tweet volume of Twittersphere.  It also echoes what teens themselves are saying about Twitter.

What Teens Say

These quotes were all pulled from comments left on blogs and articles discussing the issue and should be considered anecdotal.  Still, a clear trend emerges.  (Note: All emphasis is mine. Also, rather than drop [sic] notes everywhere, I assure you that any typos or mispellings are in the original postings.)

They realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their ‘tweets’ are pointless.” – Matthew Robson

“i am 14, and i dont use twitter a lot, but i do use it sometimes.
truth is theres better things out there
- bebo
- myspace
- my yearbook
- facebook
and most things have a little box “what are you doing now” and then you can comment people easier and comment pictures and upload them a lot easier.
adults cant be bothered with these sites, so twitter only takes a few mintues but to be honest the amount of my friends that have
“i dont really get twitter at all” and “whats the point”
on their page is unbelievable,
most of the time you dont get a reply if you send a message anyway?”  - Sarah Kendall

“Yeah so as a young person, most kids my age (17) don’t use twitter. It is not because it is seen as for adults, but simply the fact that a fb (facebook) status is further reaching. Twitter is very plain and a bit boring after your done with your tweet, on fb there are a multitude of things to do.” – getoverit91

“As a teenager, I also do not feel the need to use Twitter. Although I have an account, I don’t find myself using it a lot. That’s mostly because I can use Facebook, which most of my friends have, to “spark conversation” and communicate. I honestly think that since Facebook has a Twitter-like status update feature, it wouldn’t make sense to use two social networks when one has more features than the other.” – WKLaw93

A recent PEW study found that 47% of online teens have posted photos where others can see them, and 89% of those teens who post photos say that people comment on the images at least “some of the time.”  Teens are posting content for the comments they get back!

And that is the key.  If you seek validation from comments and engagement with your peers, then you are going to prefer social networks that facilitate that kind of transaction.  Adults, on the other hand, tend to be content just to have people listen to and repeat their ideas, to know that they are interesting and important enough to amass an army of followers.   Not only is it flattering, but less demanding and time consuming as well.   Marketers who hope to speak to either group would do well to bear in mind the kind of social currency each group values.

To oversimplify, teens tend to seek approval  (implicit and explicit)  from their peers, while we adults quite like the sounds of our own voices.

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