News Flash: 15 Year-olds Are Not Tweeting

While having dinner a few nights ago with family friends, I took the opportunity to chat up their 15 year old son on his preference for social networking sites. He has a MySpace and Facebook page.

“Do you tweet?” I asked him.  He stopped a moment, “do I what?”  Now I was puzzled and tried to explain the recent phenomenon (known as Twitter). “Do you, you know, ‘tweet’? It’s a micro blog on this site called Twitter…” I could see he had no clue as to what I was talking about.  His preference was, in fact, Facebook. It was 2009.

At the time, most of my peers are ages 24-29 and they’ve otherwise abandoned their MySpace sites in favor of communicating on Facebook.  Is it for the cleaner interface?  Or the ability to network amongst a foundation of college-based individuals?  Whatever the reason, every brand needs to do their own legwork of finding where their target audience is hanging out socially online.

For marketers reading this and wondering, “where should I be?” or “what social networking site is best for my brand?”  Think about your target market first.  Think about why they would be on a particular social networking site (consider their values, activities and benefits offered by that platform) and then find a creative, constructive and intuitive way for consumers to interact with your brand. 

The moral of this short story is: don’t think you have to be on X social platform just because everyone else is (or isn’t) doing it because, news flash, your target market might not even be on that social platform!