Adults fuel Twitter growth
The early success of social sites has been attributed to teenagers but the explosive growth of Twitter is more due to middle-aged adults. The New York Times Bits blog reports:
A report on the reach of social technologies, published Tuesday by Forrester Research, said that in the last year, young people almost universally used social media. (Only 3 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds do not use social tools online.) These people have been using social media for a long time, though, and they are not driving its growth.
More intriguing is a look at what older adults are doing online. According to Forrester, use of social media among those 35 to 54 jumped 60 percent in the last year. Half of online adults in the United States interact on social networks and more than three-fourths used social media in the last month.
Another New York Times piece, this time on the front page of today’s business section, also discusses how the younger set is not a big user of Twitter:
Kristen Nagy, an 18-year-old from Sparta, N.J., sends and receives 500 text messages a day. But she never uses Twitter, even though it publishes similar snippets of conversations and observations.
The article continues:
Her reluctance to use Twitter, a feeling shared by others in her age group, has not doomed the microblogging service. Just 11 percent of its users are aged 12 to 17, according to comScore. Instead, Twitter’s unparalleled explosion in popularity has been driven by a decidedly older group. That success has shattered a widely held belief that young people lead the way to popularizing innovations.
I’ve noticed that almost all the columnists and bloggers that I read are now on Twitter. My personal feeling about Twitter is in accord with the quote in the article from Ms. Nagy:
“I just think it’s weird and I don’t feel like everyone needs to know what I’m doing every second of my life,” she said.
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