Teens Just Aren’t That Into Twitter.

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.

“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. … 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.”

But it appears that, although they’re not tweeting themselves, they do follow others who do.

“Wendy Grazier, a mother in Arkansas, said her two teenaged daughters thought Twitter was “lame,” yet they asked her to follow teenage pop stars like Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift on Twitter so she could report back on what the celebrities wrote. Why won’t they deign to do it themselves? “It seems more, like, professional, and not something that a teenager would do,” said 16-year-old Miranda Grazier. “I think I might join when I’m older.”

If teens really do perceive Twitter as a top-down, controlled form of communication and not the informal, conversational vehicle its generally perceived to be among adults — that’s important for marketers to know. They may be listening, but they have no illusions about the message being as tightly controlled as in say, a TV spot.