Your kids probably know, understand, and have an opinion about Twitter. Do you? Its another alternative to Facebook for kids...
Twitter is a social networking site based on the premise that you can get all the information you need to know in short bursts of 140 characters (or less) called tweets.
Originally Twitter aimed to be a place where people could share personal updates with their friends by tweeting their everyday activities. But as Facebook started to monopolize the term “social network,” Twitter began to focus less on the “social” part and more on the “network.”
Today, Twitter is mainly an information-sharing site where people go for news, celebrity gossip, and keeping tabs on their favorite brands and companies. In fact, 41% of Twitter users have never tweeted after creating their account – they are explicitly signing up in order to “follow” a particular person that interests them and receive all of their tweets.
The most popular people to follow on Twitter? They include celebrities (Ashton Kutcher, Oprah, Lance Armstrong, and Kim Kardashian,) politicians (Barack Obama,) music groups (Coldplay and Britney Spears,) and news entities (CNN and the New York Times.)
Twitter has 106 million registered users worldwide and boasts a total of 55 million tweets per day. But your kids are not Twitter's biggest demographic. Whereas only 14% of Twitter users are age 17 or under, most (45%) are in the 18-35 age range.
Among most teenagers Twitter has gotten a reputation for being more for older people, or something professionals and business owners do to promote themselves to others. Most teens say that following their friends on Twitter is kind of redundant, since their tweets basically say the same things as their Facebook status updates.
So your child may be on Twitter, but it probably isn't for the same reason they're on Facebook. Facebook has become more of a place to share your life with your friends, while Twitter has become a site for getting information and news on whatever is important to you.
The good news is that you probably don't have to worry about your kids splashing their personal information all over Twitter – the bad news is that they're probably using it to find out what Lady Gaga is up to every moment of the day.
-Article Contributed by Jenny Evans
