There was an article on comscore recently showing the explosion of twitter traffic and it provides an interesting jumping off point for something I've been thinking about "youth marketing" and the idea of "early adopters".
First of the sharp rise in traffic in the last few months is relatively unsurprising given the publicity twitter has had lately. The senators sending tweets during Obama's speech recently really rocketed it into the spotlight.
What was really interesting was the demographics of twitter users:
"18-24 year olds, the traditional social media early adopters, are actually 12 percent less likely than average to visit Twitter (Index of 88). It is the 25-54 year old crowd that is actually driving this trend. More specifically, 45-54 year olds are 36 percent more likely than average to visit Twitter, making them the highest indexing age group, followed by 25-34 year olds, who are 30 percent more likely."
In the comscore post they link to this Reuters article that basically says that "new" technology isn't new any more, the technologically inclined "early adopters" are getting older, and that twitter is a simple technology that an older users, who in ever increasing numbers are getting plugged in to an increasingly more user friendly internet, can get their heads around.
While this is undoubtedly true, I think there is another factor at play. Twitter isn't terribly useful to most 12-24 year olds. The appeal of twitter is that you can reach out to, and draw from, a wider audience, which is why twitter is good for professionals and those looking for opportunities to build their careers and public profiles through self promotion and networking.
The demographic data could be explained by the fact that (despite what people like Future Lab may say) most people in their teens and early 20's aren't terribly concerned with building a career and networking yet, and to engage with the network they actually care about, cell phones and facebook work just fine.
The idea that teens would always be at the forefront of internet technology is, at this point, a rather dated one. It contains the assumption that new technology and new applications are one sort of thing. Different people have different needs and different goals and online, mobile and social technologies allow them to meet those goals in different ways.
This leads me to three thoughts that may warrant further exploration in other blog posts a) about a possible misconception about youth culture, b) about the inadequacy of the term "early adopter", and c) about the offline impact of online technology being more interesting and useful to look at than the latest widget or killer app.
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