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Who is Really Tweeting?

by Andy Edwards

When considering the role of social networking in their online strategies, e-Business professionals shouldn't assume that all technologies attract the same users. "I just think it's weird and I don't feel like everyone needs to know what I'm doing every second of my life." This is not the comment of a hardened 50-year old business professional. 18-year old Kristen Nagy made the comment in a recent New York Times article about the demographics of those using Twitter, the social networking technology. The article goes on to quote Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst studying social media, who notes that "Twitter did not attract the young trendsetters at the outset. Its growth has instead come from adults who might not have used other social sites before Twitter."

The piece asserts that traditional social networking tools such as Facebook and Myspace attracted teenagers in droves at first, since their focus was on connecting with friends. Since most social interaction amongst this demographic occurs between friends, these platforms served as an ideal conduit for that discourse. Twitter, on the other hand is, "better for broadcasting ideas or questions and answers to the outside world or for marketing a product. It is also useful for marketing the person doing the tweeting, a need few teenagers are attuned to."

Such needs aren't on the top of most teenagers' to-do lists, but these goals are top priorities for sales and marketing professionals in the insurance and asset management industry. kasina's research on advisor behavior online indicates that it is not just the younger generation of advisors who use the Web as part of their investment selection process. These latest findings about Twitter underline the important point that all social networking tools are not the same. Serious thought needs to be put into whether to embrace these technologies on a case-by-case basis. Has your firm Tweeted lately?