I recently read somewhere (on an over-subscribed, over-hyped daily newspaper’s website), that it’s the middle-aged driving Twitter’s success. That 45 to 54-year-olds are actually 36 per cent more likely than average to visit the site. And what’s more, they spend longer on the site than 18-24-year-olds.
Now, this shouldn’t surprise me. But it does. It’s a bit like finding out that your dad has more sex than you do. And that’s not right in anyone’s world (unless your dad’s Hugh Hefner, maybe). That said, some of the most famous tweeters in Britain are middle-aged. Stephen Fry tops the list, closely followed by Jonathan Ross and Jamie Oliver. You can’t even turn on the radio nowadays without some over-enthusiastic, middle-aged presenter who thinks that laughing at his own jokes makes them funny, pleading for people to follow him on Twitter.
So why are the “middle-aged” driving Twitter’s success? It’s not as if that cross-section of society has a history of early-adopting. Could it be they have a larger attention span than the younger generation and are more willing to maintain their microblogs? Perhaps they better realise the marketing potential that Twitter has for their own brands – in February alone Twitter’s worldwide user figures stood at 10 million, some audience for businesses and celebrities to aim their brand at.
And while on the subject of celebrity tweeters, did you hear that some of them actually have ‘ghost tweeters’ – people who update their microblogs for them! Come on, now. That’s just lazy! It’s only 140 characters. If you can’t fill that you have no business starting a microblog in the first place.
Oh and here’s an interesting aside. Type Twitter into Google. The first result is the Twitter website, naturally. The second is Barack Obama’s Twitter microblog. The most famous middle-aged man on the planet… As for why it’s so popular with the middle-aged? Well, we’re still not sure. Maybe we should have just got a ghost writer to come up with this blog…