US Teens and Social Networks

Written on Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Ok, I know this is the second post about U.S. teens in a short while (this was the other one), but it's just happened I've come across another survey on teens from the U.S., published by the Pew Internet project.

There's a number of interesting stats, not all about mobile usage this time round, but also about social networks that are becoming more and more closely tied with mobile.

Here's the most interesting bits from the article:

The study showed 8% of internet users ages 12-17 use Twitter. This makes Twitter as common among teens as visiting a virtual world, and far less common than sending or receiving text messages as 66% of teens do, or going online for news and political information, done by 62% of online teens. 73% of wired American teens now use social networking websites, other than Twitter, a significant increase from previous surveys. Just over half of online teens (55%) used social networking sites in November 2006 and 65% did so in February 2008. Pew has not quantified teen use of Facebook yet.

Blogging has dropped by exactly half since 2006, according to the report. 14% of online teens now say they blog, down from 28% of teen internet users in 2006. This decline is also reflected in the lower incidence of teen commenting on blogs within social networking websites; 52% of teen social network users report commenting on friends’ blogs, down from the 76% who did so in 2006. By comparison, the prevalence of blogging within the overall adult internet population has remained steady in recent years. Pew Internet surveys since 2005 have consistently found that roughly one in ten online adults maintain a personal online journal or blog.

The report also found:

• Facebook is currently the most commonly-used online social network among adults. Among adult profile owners 73% have a profile on Facebook, 48% have a profile on MySpace and 14% have a LinkedIn profile.
• In the past five years, cell phone ownership has become mainstream among even the youngest teens. Fully 58% of 12-year olds now own a cell phone, up from just 18% of such teens as recently as 2004.
• 31% of online teens get health, dieting or physical fitness information from the internet. And 17% of online teens report they use the internet to gather information about health topics that are hard to discuss with others such as drug use and sexual health topics.

Posted in social networking |