Young Folks Don’t Care About Twitter… Maybe
By Patrick Courtney
There’s a lot of buzz over the “Teens Don’t Tweet” report published by the Nielsen Company today, including articles from Mashable and Business Insider.
While I have no evidence to argue against this other than the myriad personal anecdotes from teens in the comments of the media coverage (I tweet therefore we tweet!) and the content in the stream of the popular trending “Teens Don’t Tweet” topic on Twitter, I do have a question about the stats Nielsen provided.
As Nielsen puts it, “…only 16 percent of Twitter.com website 
users were under the age of 25. Bear in mind persons under 25 make up nearly one quarter of the active US Internet universe, which means that Twitter.com effectively under-indexes on the youth market by 36 percent.”
Fine, but check out the age breakdown in the graph. You’ve got 55+ (avg US life expectancy is about 75, so we’ll go with that), 25-54, and 2-25. That gives us ranges of 21 years, 29 years, and 23 years, respectively.
However, you have to be 13 to join Twitter, so that cuts the youngest demographic in half, making those ranges 21 years, 29 years, and 13 years.
This seems heavily skewed in favor of the older demographics and of course a demo segment would under index when half the audience are literally not legally allowed to use the service, right? But I welcome more savvy statistics people to show me the light.
Regardless, it wasn’t the teens under indexing bit that caught me off guard the most. No, what gets me is that 20% of the Twitter audience is 55+. Tweetup at The Villages, tonight!
