360DigitalInfluence

Mashable this week posted about the low numbers of teens on Twitter.  The post invited readers to weigh in on why they thought this was (e.g. they’re too private, they prefer texting, etc) – once the comment count spilled into the hundreds, Mashable wrote a follow up post further analyzing the issue.

At the risk of throwing my hat into an already crowded ring, here’s why I think Twitter sees low adoption among teens:  Teenagers, for the most part, do not yet posses weak social ties – the very connections that fuel nearly all of twitter’s growth.

Wikipedia defines it this way:

Weak social ties, it is argued, are responsible for the majority of the embeddedness and structure of social networks in society as well as the transmission of information through these networks. Because our close friends tend to move in the same circles that we do, the information they receive overlaps considerably with what we already know. Acquaintances, by contrast, know people that we do not, and thus receive more novel information.

The vast majority of my connections on twitter fall into the latter – digital acquaintances: bloggers I like, people I’ve met at conferences, my favorite podcasters, my former colleagues.  That’s really what I’m after on Twitter: the new, novel ideas that I haven’t yet encountered because I rarely or never see these people in real life.

Anyone closer than an acquaintance and twitter starts to feel like I’m drinking from a dripping faucet.  I’d rather check out their recent news and photos on Facebook, or meet up for a beer after work.

Also, teens don’t usually have a narrowly focused area of expertise.  You don’t usually come across a 17 year old who’s really plugged in to IT Optimization or wants to connect with other Commercial Architects.  Those disciplines emerge as one enters undergraduate coursework, takes on an internship and dives into a profession.  The desire to join an professional affinity group is practically non-existent with kids just trying to survive high school.

As a result, teens tend to gather on the friend focused platforms, the strong-ties– Facebook, Myspace, mobile.  This makes sense; that’s where their digital lives start and end.

[Chart From Silicon Valley Insider's Chart of the Day]

[Update: Kaitlyn Wilkins, James Poulter and I discussed teenagers using Twitter on this morning That Show Media Show.  You can listen to the full show, recapping the week in social media, using the Blog Talk Radio widget on the right sidebar of this blog.]