Teens and Twitter and the upside

I've been seeing all kinds of stories and posts and tweets and whatever about the alarming revelation that teens don't use Twitter. (The link is arbitrary - there are loads of stories out there; it's just one of many.)

The tone of many of these is that this is a bad thing and Twitter is in trouble and something really bad must be in the offing.

What if the reverse is true? What if one of the attractions of Twitter is that teens aren't on it?

I hate sounding like some old grump doing the, "Kids these days ..." routine because it doesn't reflect how I think or feel. Quite the opposite. But let's be realistic -- much of what teens are interested in is only of interest to other teens, they often have a vocabulary all their own and, being the old grumps we are, it's of no interest to us. It's clutter. It's noise.

Doesn't that make something like Twitter more attractive if one of their aspects is the absence of this? For an older demographic, doesn't it make it more useful?

And where did the implicit notion that the only demographic that spends money, the only one worth targeting for marketing purposes, was the teen set? An older demographic is likely to have more money to spend, and likely to spend on higher priced items (because they can). The only possible difference, and I'm not sure this is true, is that they may take more pursuading.

And where did this idea come from that in order to be successful you had to be the biggest, have the most users, reach the most people? Those might be nice things to have (if you know how to leverage such an audience - most don't), but it's more than possible to make a good buck being smaller or, put another way, big enough.

I'm not saying these things apply to Twitter. But they are worth taking into account. If Twitter doesn't attract a teen audience, it's not the end of the world. In some ways, it may be the best of all worlds.

Put another way, by putting the text of the image above the opposite way, "My kids don't use Twitter. I shouldn't have to explain this."

(By the way ... I loved that image. I thought it hilarious. It's from the Seth Simmonds site.)