Stats Confirm It: Teens Don’t Tweet

What's important to remember is that we all grew up on Facebook, so I'm going to explain things about "twitter" as a Facebook user. They might not all be accurate, but they are all more or less believed.

RT/Re-tweeting is analogous to seeing an interesting facebook status, and copying it to yours. Even if it's spectacular, at best, people won't care, and at worst, you're seen as unoriginal.

@'ing It's like using your status message to say something to a friend. You don't need to do that, people don't care what you have to say. Instead, write on their wall. It still shows up in minifeeds and people can still see it (more private messages go through facebook messages), but it doesn't have the undertone of "EVERYONE should know what I'm saying to you" (maybe it should?)

Tweeting in general - Tweets are analogous to facebook statuses. The thing about statuses though, is that no one reads them. I know almost no one who bothers to keep their status up to date. On the other hand, people are tweeting every 10 minutes during "important events".

If you want to provide a narrative, use pictures. I'd much rather look at an album then see "Just got to the party" "It's kind of lame" "Now we're dancing" "Everyone's so messed up" "Now we're at Denny's"

Among teens I know, only the most vain and the most geeky have twitter accounts.

That's because most of the people using TweetDeck are those let's-do-marketing-on-whatever-is-hot-this-week people. 30 accounts spewing stuff about Web 2.5 or SEO or Pepsi or whatever.