The Ocean Agency

Yesterday, Twitter was abuzz with some new statistics. According to a Nielsen report, teens are using twitter much less than their “adult” (meaning 25-35 year old) peers.

Who cares? Well, seemingly everyone. Why do people care? There are a few reasons.

First, teens are synonymous with cool in our youth obsessed society. We are both in awe of teenagers and fear them. Every generation recognizes that teenagers have the power to shape the future of society, with a powerful combination of idealistic attitudes and expendable income.

Marketers are obsessed with teenage choice for this very reason. Most income teens make is expendable, and historically, they are our social taste makers– getting in on trends before they hit their groundswell.

Based on this logic, it makes perfect sense why people are worried that teens aren’t on Twitter. To put it bluntly, it makes Twitter uncool.

On the surface this logic makes sense. However, this logic relies on the an old media model, where big media would batter teens with carefully controlled messages that would then start a trend.

The fact that teens are slowly coming to twitter represents a shift in overall marketing strategy, and the power of new media marketing. Instead of Twitter blasting their message out to whoever will listen, they built a community of tech savvy users. Based on the activity of the community, traditional media picked up the story, and the groundswell began.

The fact that teens aren’t on Twitter does not mean that Twitter has “jumped the shark” or is uncool. It just means that it isn’t exactly useful to teens–yet. It will be soon. As more celebrities, bands, and interesting brands do more with their Twitter presence, the teens will follow.

Right now Twitter is doing just fine without teens, and with an active community of millions of users we may have one of the first social phenomena that teens are not intricately involved with– yet.  But don’t expect those teens to come on Twitter just because us geezers thinks it’s cool.