The Influx Of Young Adults On Twitter
- November 4th, 2009
- 8 Comments
In today’s Research Roundup we cite numbers from the Pew Internet & American Life Project that reflect a growing number of Gen Y’ers (18-24 year olds) using Twitter. It got me to thinking about the evolution of my personal Twitter account and the new wave of social contacts (friends vs. colleagues) I’m starting to see flock to the space.
Since we’re once again dealing with the tricky 18-24 year old demo that includes both college students and recent grads, I’ll clarify to say this post mainly refers to the latter. My sense is that while both segments are gaining momentum in the space there are different motivations at play. Particularly, as I mentioned in an earlier post on social networks and recent grads, in the post-college appeal that lies in the opportunity to migrate away from the cluttered history of a social network five years in the making like Facebook, without the need to completely abandon one for the other.
By focusing on a dynamic newsfeed instead of a static profile, Twitter allows young users in a transitional period between college and post-college to not only build an entirely new contact list, but also to create a more fluid identity based on the information they choose to disseminate through links/retweets and brief exchanges between friends and colleagues. In other words, the space is as professional or social as you make it. In my own non-branded Twitter identity, for instance, the outgoing content is usually status updates directed towards my chat-worthy contacts while the ingoing is a condensed version of my RSS newsfeed, streamlining the websites/blogs I follow into snippets of conversation and links to longer stories. Every so often connecting the two with an @ response or RT. Meanwhile, the option to feed Twitter into a preexisting social network makes it a conscious choice to keep them independent or not.
Why this may be driving more growth in this demo now than ever before may be a matter of influence trickling out from early adopters to friends and friends of friends gradually creating the same mass adoption that happened back when Facebook first started, as well as an increase in the presence of the types of youth-targeted blogs, websites and online personalities that Libby and I mentioned in our Friday Forum.
For more campus coverage, visit the Ypulse Campus Channel, sponsored by Campus Media Group.
[...] purposes. That same sentiment was shared by Meredith Sires of Gen Y trend-watching site, YPulse. She theorizes that the rapid growth in the 18-24 demographic has to do more with the recent college graduates [...]
[...] - More on Gen Y and Twitter (ReadWriteWeb picks up the discussion around the latest Pew Research I brought up in my post) [...]
[...] purposes. That same sentiment was shared by Meredith Sires of Gen Y trend-watching site, YPulse. She theorizes that the rapid growth in the 18-24 demographic has to do more with the recent college graduates [...]
I completely agree with you on how college graduates are using Twitter. I recently graduated and use Twitter for networking, to discover new content and news, and to learn from some of the top people in fields I am interested in.
I recently wrote a blog about my usage of Facebook and Twitter that touches on many of your key points:
http://media140.org/?p=572
Thanks for the write up!
[...] Sires de YPulse, un site traquant les tendances de la génération Y, théorise sur le fait que la croissance rapide du segment des 18-24 ans sur Twitter est lié à ceux qui, [...]
[...] Sires de YPulse, un site traquant les tendances de la génération Y, théorise sur le fait que la croissance rapide du segment des 18-24 ans sur Twitter est lié à ceux qui, [...]
[...] Sires de YPulse, un site traquant les tendances de la génération Y, théorise sur le fait que la croissance rapide du segment des 18-24 ans sur Twitter est lié à ceux qui, [...]
[...] purposes. That same sentiment was shared by Meredith Sires of Gen Y trend-watching site, YPulse. She theorizes that the rapid growth in the 18-24 demographic has to do more with the recent college graduates [...]