Judson Collier

Bollocks.

Bollocks. Bollocks. Bollocks. They’re all full of it. I promise.

Lately, there’s been this uprising of random, folk proclaiming the gospel of who uses social media. Said people, who will not be named, (cough, Neilson, Morgan Stanley) haven’t exactly thought this out. Too many people are relying on numbers and plain assumptions than researching the environment of where it’s occurring. No, teens aren’t on twitter. Now answer me why!

To understand this interesting predicament, let me introduce you into the world of teens, only for a moment (wouldn’t want to scar you any further than what is required).

Adoption of services for teens is really rare. Facebook and Myspace is where it’s at— PhotoBucket as well, but only to host photos for their Myspace layouts. You might find some artsy scene kids over at DeviantArt and Flickr, but I really don’t like to consider those Social Networks because they serve a purpose other than interaction.

So what spawns the adoption of a new network? Four things occur, in their respective order: 1. Niche usage, 2. National usage 3. Celebrity/Network usage and finally, local usage, from friends and family.

Nation usage occurs first. This occurred for Twitter in the first two years. A slow incline upward giving Twitter a chance to kick out the bugs (ergggh, that was a painful time). You may find a few exceptions such as myself, where I fall in a connected, niche range of designers and tech users— You have to remember, teens live unconnected from popular news sites like CNN and MSNBC and the newspaper of any sort. They don’t read the news, therefore cannot learn about these new technologies in stage one or two.

Nation usage starts to pick up, Twitter is stabilized. Some well known early adopters like newscasters and actors start to pick it up, and begins to take traction across the nation with adults and college students.

Stage three is where we start seeing some traction in the Young Adult demographic. Celebrities, TV networks, musicians and actors pick up Twitter, and start to attract teens and preteens to follow their favorite stars. I like to think of this group of teens as the early adopters of their age— they started showing up late last year and early this year. If you don’t believe that teens are on twitter, then you clearly haven’t seen the hoards of people following Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato and all those other Disney stars— cause i’m pretty sure it’s not the adults (er…).

Right now, we are falling in-between step three and four. Slowly and surely, teens are beginning to trickle onto the site.

So where’s the tipping point? When do people begin to flood, like they did after Oprah joined twitter? I believe the proper answer lies in “Tipping Points.

Teens live in bubbles, so to speak. They do what our friends do— not what the nation does. They have absolutely no outlets, except from celebrities, MTV and Disney, barring a few exceptions. But, celebrities aren’t enough to bring everyone on. Those minor exceptions who join for celebrities, and the hipsters who are just simply looking for something cool, bring on other friends. Then small groups of friends join in.

But each bubble is a different use case. If one school gets really involved on twitter, thats it. It might flow over to a very close school nearby, but it won’t create a mass epidemic. We work in bubbles.

So let me show you my use case, at my high school. I’ve been on twitter for about three years—I was an exception to the rule. First came the hipsters. Then came the early adopters, those who came on for celebrities. Then the local bands followed suit of celebrities, creating accounts to promote their music (this would be around Janurary of 2009). At this time there was about 5-6 people on Twitter from my school. See how incredibly slow it moves? But, 5-6 quickly multiplied into 30-40 people within 6 months. And that’s just during the summer, wait until we get back in school. My guess is that 100-200 people will be using twitter by the second semester.

It’s important to understand how that change happened though. A couple of the local bands invited their friends onto twitter, and a lot of them joined and actively use it now. But only the people inside the bubble joined. No weak ties, just a large group of mutual, good friends. Teens have a very limited network of friends, and although it’s easy to add those weaker ties as friends, it’s much more difficult to recruit them to a service.

Some schools are more successful than others.

This is not exactly The Tipping Point kids. Same ideas, smaller reach.