Twitter has experienced phenomenal growth over the last couple of years. Unlike many social media sites, however Twitter’s growth hasn’t been driven by the youth – it’s us old people that are signing up in droves.
“The traditional early-adopter model would say that teenagers or college students are really important to adoption,” said Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis at comScore. Teenagers, after all, drove the early growth of the social networks Facebook, MySpace and Friendster.
Twitter, however, has proved that “a site can take off in a different demographic than you expect and become very popular,” he said. “Twitter is defying the traditional model.”
Sure, teenagers and college students made MySpace and Facebook what they are today, but young people also have a ton of time on their hands to customize profiles, add “about me” information, browse profiles, and so on. Older folks usually have responsibilities like careers and kids, and so they don’t (or can’t) devote the same amount of attention to keeping updated.
The great thing about Twitter, however, is that it doesn’t require much of a learning curve or time commitment to participate. Even better, it’s been built to work on mobile devices, so users can check tweets and update on the go. Given this dynamic, it’s no surprise Twitter has been embraced by older users, who are able to get a lot out of a service they don’t have to put a lot into.
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