The Relevance & Staying Power Of Twitter For Teens & College Kids

Lately, it's a rarity for a day to pass without someone asking us about Twitter and the youth market. The questions range from the straightforward and simple (do they use it?) to something more strategic in nature (how do I integrate Twitter into our social media marketing plans in a relevant way that will attract and engage our target audience?).

For starters, in terms of registrations, Twitter's growth among teens and college students has been impressive through the first nine months of the year. At the start of the year, only about 5% had registered for a Twitter account compared to 19% at the end of September. Of course, that's only one data point. The more impactful findings are things like frequency of access, frequency of updates and the number of people the individual is actively following. Basically, how sticky is the platform? From our perspective, these are the more meaningful metrics.

Frequency of Access:

- among the 19% with a Twitter account, only about a quarter (23%) have posted 5 or more updates during the past week and about one in five (19%) said they posted less than 5 updates since first registering an account

Followers & Following:

- teen and college student Twitter users have an average of 57 followers and they follow an average of 61 people, companies and brands

- the most commonly followed non-people are news & information centric: ESPN (net sub-brand mentions), CNN, Fox News, NY Times (net sub-brand mentions), Google (net sub-brand mentions) and Xbox (net sub-brand mentions)

- the most commonly followed "notable" people/personalities are the one's you'd expect them to be: Dave Matthews, Jason Mraz Taylor Swift, John Mayer, LeBron James and Dane Cook

- more than three in ten (32%) say they are at least somewhat interested in using Twitter more to follow updates from friends, brands/companies

So, what's the net here? Well, we think it's a fair assessment to say Twitter, at least among the teen/college segment is still pretty niche in terms of stickiness. It's not necessarily a bad move strategically to include Twitter as one element within a broader social media plan, but in that same breath, probably not the most pragmatic play to make it your sole element.

The updated and expanded  Q4 '09 Youth Social Media Marketing & Insights report will be available to download/purchase the week of November 23rd.

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