The Pew Internet report, published in December '07, was a detailed study into the online behavioural characteristics of teenagers aged 12-17, focused on their social media activity, for example in blogs, chatrooms and social networks. It's an interesting report and well worth reading if you're in this field.
A few key findings:
64% of all online teens are involved in content creation in some way, up from 57% in their 2004 survey. This includes 39% sharing art, photos, stories or videos, up from 33%, and 28% with their own blog, up from 19%.
A figure often touted about is that 10% of people create content, and 90% consume it. This study shows clearly that with the new generation of teens growing up, these numbers could actually be reversed. The ability of internet users to create and share content, and to find willing consumers, is a testament to the long tail and shows a real shift in behaviour. As this increases, the importance of content aggregators and ways of finding relevant content will become more and more important - expect social search to be very big.
The social networks really need to work on this, as my personal experience on using the search engines on both Facebook and Myspace to find groups and people are very poor (Facebook don't seem to realise that active groups with thousands of users could be more relevant than inactive groups with no users, as anyone searching for a popular group name will have found out - let alone groups with your friends in!).
The report singles out older girls (15-17) as the biggest content creators in their study, as well as being the most active group in social networks and other online activity. However, this is not the case for online video - 14% of all teens have posted videos, compared to 21% of older boys (15-17), and 19% of all boys. This trend towards video creation could be a good sign for tools like Seesmic, offering video micro-media.
55% of teens are users of social networks.
The most striking aspect of this number is how low it is - it just shows how much more capacity there is for social networks. Expect to see continuing fast growth of social network uptake, which is good news for social networks, app developers, and companies wanting to move to interactive, opt-in marketing rather than interruption marketing.
Multi-channel teens are super communicators - and spend more time with friends face to face
28% of their study were multi-channel teens, using internet, cell phones, IM, SMS and social networks to communicate with their friends. What's interesting is that these multi-channel teens actually spend more time talking over the phone and meeting face to face with their friends than do the average teen. This is even more striking when comparing social network using teens to non social network users - with 38% spending time with friends in person every day compared to 25%. Much of this will be because social networks attract more sociable people - but they also make it easier to forge new connections and find interest groups.
This is a great blow to detractors who claim that social networks are taking children away from face to face contact and making them less sociable - the study shows them to be proved wrong. It even found that teens who are more active online and more active offline than other teens, participating in more extra-curricular school activities.
Aside from being great stats to wave in front of anti-social networkers, the study also shows that there is still lots of growth to be had in mobile calls, instant messages, text messages and social network communication as the rest of the teen population gets active online. It will be interesting to watch the development of companies like Mig33 who combine all of these.
A big drop in chat room popularity
The study found a drop of chatroom use to just 18%, from 55% in 2000. As social networks are allowing people to reach others, including interest groups, and form weak ties with them by becoming friends or joining similar groups, with instant messaging allowing these users to have direct chat, and even to form their own private chat groups via the IM clients, I expect that these conversations are still going on, just in a different format. Watch this area - instant chat in Facebook groups, possibly?
82% of social network teens use them to keep in touch with friends they rarely see in person
This study is not a surprise, and it backs up the weak-tie value of social networks for marketers, as well as showing the social value of these platforms.
0 comments:
Post a Comment