Will youth ever adopt Twitter?

Teens and Twitter

I get asked this question a lot lately and now, with worried parents wanting to know what twitter is, I thought I would give you my perspective.

My initial reaction is no, however let me explain this so you can understand why.

Early indications showed that twitter could be the alternative to text messaging, with 25% of its users being under 25 and Japanese youth having rapidly adopted twitter into their daily social activities. However I always had my doubts; how could anything populated by mostly over-25s ever be appealing to the youth? And it would appear I was right, with recent statistics now showing that just 3.6% of twitter users are young people.

So why is that? I think there are a few reasons

1. While twitter is cool it is certainly not rebel cool; it does not have the rebellious, standing out from the crowd appeal that young people love. In the early stages it was the playground for young technogeeks, but as twitter has grown up and got massive press coverage through celebrities, news channels and the US president using it, it has lost that underground feeling that made it attractive to young people in the first place.

2. I think that all in all, they do not need it….young people really only want to communicate with people they know, people they bring into their sphere and they can do that already; text and MSN are still their fave ways to communicate. While these are certainly not as easy to use as twitter, they have an exclusivity about them which means that the users feel they are in their own little world. Why should they adopt something that they do not need?

I do think that micro-blogging is appealing to them and they will move to something new. The exodus from Facebook of young people shows that they are looking, however what this is yet to be is unclear. Whatever it is, it is likely to be a long time before us grown-ups know about it….