In a recent CNN interview with Twitter CEO Evan Williams, he said that if he were to be given a choice, he would rather have adults on the micro-blogging platform than teenagers. He added on by saying Twitter is not a social networking website, and the main focus of the San Francisco-based company is real-time information of the things you care about — work, industry, company, news.
Recently, statistics have shown that teens don’t use Twitter and the Twitterverse is dominated by young adults between the age of 18-34. As a professional tech blogger, I love Twitter because it’s a useful tool in helping me to promote my tech blog to a wider audience and to keep up to the latest trends or news in the world. However, when it comes to publishing personal updates, Facebook is still my preferred choice as many of my friends and schoolmates use the social networking giant.
Once, I asked my fellow peers regarding their perceptions of Twitter. Some of them simply shrugged their shoulders (because they have never heard of Twitter before) and the rest said it’s “useless” and “stupid”. On the other hand, Facebook is associated with the words “fun”, “enjoyable” and “cool”. I’m not surprised by their responses and the reason why is simple.
Teens Have One Focus In Mind – Friends and Not Political News
There’s no doubt that today’s generation of teenagers are tech-savvy. It’s a common sight to see teens spending a huge portion of their time on Facebook, blogging and Instant Messengers. These share a common denominator – friends. By using these social networking platforms, teens are able to interact and connect with their friends online after school. For example, they can share their views, thoughts and opinions of a particular issue on their MSN’s personal message, Facebook Wall, personal blogs and many more.
Although it’s possible to make the micro-blogging “private”, but unfortunately, the culture of Twitter is all about participation in a large public square. Dubbed as an “epicenter of world events”, Twitter is filled with lots of news and information. Everyone on Twitter has become a web journalist, breaking news at a much faster pace and probably higher accuracy as compared to traditional media. What’s more is that many Internet marketers and bloggers tend to use the service as a marketing tool to publish their articles or products.
Do you think many teens out there really care much about what’s happening in the recent Iran presidential election and the latest news in both the physical and technological worlds? Honestly speaking, they don’t really bother much about all these stuff. What they are interested in are games and friends. Besides that, Twitter doesn’t offers a threaded conversation feature unlike Facebook. Therefore, teens prefer to use Facebook and MySpace rather than Twitter.