Social media and Internet use among teens and young adults

I think in the Netherlands almost every teenager and young adult has a social network site (SNS). It all started with Hyves, a SNS that is just for Dutch people. Hyves was particularly popular among teens, but would later also be used by young adults. Marketeers and businessmen noticed that Hyves offered a possibility to easily reach their target group. As a result, more adults started to maintain a profile on Hyves. Recent statistics show that with 10,8 million profiles of which 9,1 million being Dutch people, almost 54% of the Dutch population has a Hyves profile!  

However, just like fashion continuously changes, SNS ascend and decline in their popularity. For example, Hyves is becoming less popular now, in contrast with Facebook, an international SNS. Facebook stats show that worldwide there are 116,8 million active users, which means that they log in at least once a month. Only 3 million (17,6% of the Dutch population) of them are Dutch profiles. 

Then there is Twitter. At the end of 2010 there were registered 16,4 million American Twitter accounts, where merely 400.000 are Dutch accounts. This means that only 2,5% of the Dutch population has a Twitter account. This percentage will ascend, since it is said that Twitter is growing faster than Facebook. It is clear that in the Netherlands SNS are very popular; sometimes even unborn babies have their own Hyves profile or Twitter account! 

Since I can be considered as a young adult, which probably my readers are too, it is interesting to look at how this group uses social media and the Internet. I found a paper of the PewResearchCenter, which shows clear findings, which I wanted to share. The results however can only be applied to young American adults.  

To spare you a lot of words, just take a look at the figures with its important conclusion.

The first figure shows that adults under 30 choose for a laptop instead of a desktop, which is reversed by adults over 30 years old. 

Figure 1: Desktops versus laptops

Figure 2 show that blogging has become less popular among teens, according as commenting on blogs. This is also applicable to figure 3, showing that young adults also lost interest in blogging over time. That's striking, since I just discovered blogging and I secretly kinda like it! Note that adults of 30 years and older have started blogging more.

Figure 2: Blogging and commenting among teens

Figure 3: Blogging among adults

 When you take a look at figure 4, you see the activities of teenagers on SNS over time, which show a decrease when it comes to sending group messages, posting comments to a friend's blog and sending private messages. Activities such as commenting on a friend's picture, sending instant messages or text messages through the site and commenting on a friend's page or wall haven't changed, instead are constant.

Figure 4: Teen's activities on SNS

The last result I want to share is about the amount of Twitter accounts among teenagers and adults. As figure 5 shows, teens are not really active at Twitter, although more girls have a Twitter account than boys. Compared to (young) adults in figure 6, of all Twitter accounts, most of them are maintained by young adults, where after the popularity declines again.

Figure 5: Twitter accounts among teens

Figure 6: Twitter accounts among adults

All that's left to say for me to say now is: "Feel free to comment on my blog, Facebook account, Twitter account of Hyves profile!

Interesting facts about Twitter

A recent study by Yahoo Research has shown that Twitter doesn't seem to be as social as we think. The production, flow and consumption of information was examined by making use of the 'lists' on Twitter:  the researchers distinguished between elite users (celebrities, bloggers, organizations and media) and ordinary users. As an interesting result, it came out that 50% of the consumed URLs is generated by just 20.000 elite users! We have to keep in mind that many Twitter accounts are 'sleeping accounts', which means that only 0,05% produces half of the content on Twitter. In addition, it seems that the media produce the most information, but celebrities are the most followed. Although media outlets are by far the most active users on Twitter, only 15% of the tweets that ordinary users receive, come directly from those media. 

There are two ways information can pass through an intermediary in Twitter. 

1. Retweeting. This means that a Twitter user rebroadcasts a received URL, which contains an explicit acknowledgement of the source.

2. Reintroduction. A user tweets a URL that has previously been posted, but this time without acknowledgement of a source. The information is probably rediscovered independently. 

The study shows that although audience attention is highly concentrated on a minority of elite users, a lot of the information they produce reaches the ordinary users indirectly via a large population of intermediaries. 

Another result was that there is great homophily within categories, which means that celebrities follow celebrities, bloggers follow bloggers, etc. There is one exception: organizations seem to pay more attention to bloggers than to themselves. Moreover, the attention paid by organizations is more evenly distributed across categories than for any other category (celebrities, bloggers or media). Take a look at figure 1, which shows how many URLS are received among the different categories.

Figure 1: Number of tweets received among elite categories

Figure 2 shows how much information within each category is retweeted by other categories. As you can see, retweeting is strongly homophilous among elite categories. However, bloggers retweet URLs from all categories. 

Figure 2: Retweet behavior among elite categories.

Furthermore, it was found that different types of content have different lifespans: the time lag between the first and the last appearance of a given URL on Twitter. It seems that media-originated URLs are mostly short-lived URLs, while those of the bloggers are mainly long-lived URLs. Finally, the longest-lived URLs are those referring to videos and music, since they are constantly rediscovered. 


The researchers of the study called 'Who Says What to Whom on Twitter' found consistent results for supporting the 'two-step flow of communications', which means that the mass media influence the public only indirectly. This concept, which is more dan 50 years old, emphasized that "opinion leaders were distributed in all occupational groups and on every social and economic level". This corresponds with the classification of most intermediaries as ordinary in the study. In addition, "the original theory claimed that opinion leaders, just like their followers, received at least some of their information via two-step flows". In general they would be more exposed to the media than their followers. This was also found in the study, since they found that "almost half of the information that originated from the media passed to the masses indirectly via a diffuse intermediate layer of opinion leaders, who although classified as ordinary users, are more connected and more exposed to the media than their followers".