From comScore:
18-24 year olds, the traditional social media early adopters, are actually 12 percent less likely than average to visit Twitter (Index of 88). It is the 25-54 year old crowd that is actually driving this trend. More specifically, 45-54 year olds are 36 percent more likely than average to visit Twitter, making them the highest indexing age group, followed by 25-34 year olds, who are 30 percent more likely.
More on this story as it develops. We’ve also been hearing a lot of anecdotal reports of “older” users showing up on Facebook and other places online that had been assumed to be the domain of what this author refers to as “traditional social media early adopters”—basically college-age users.
One possible explanation: the early adopters are moving on to things that can still be adopted early. Getting a Facebook or Twitter account now isn’t early adopting, it’s just adopting. There’s a subtle but persistent assumption in a lot of social media discussion that online social tools are always at least a bit out of the mainstream. As popular as Facebook or Twitter or anything else might be, as much attention as they might get, there’s always this notion in the background that not everyone will be a part of this thing. At least not to the same degree.
But what if Twitter and Facebook (and maybe other things) are really getting ready to go mainstream? What if we stop identifying the people that use these tools as the category “early adopters” and start instead thinking about the people that don’t as “late adopters”—people who just haven’t adopted yet?
That would almost certainly mean that these online spaces would lose a bit of their special something. Twitter can’t be the Twitter of 2007-era facinated-but-skeptical coverage if everyone is tweeting. Facebook can’t serve as the specific sort of social enclave it was (in what may be remebered as its hay-day) if everyone is looking at each other.
So, there is some evidence to support speculation that:
- Eventually the social technologies like micro-messaging and social networking will become essentially fully mainstream
- The demographic that led the charge in making them so will abandon them (or at least the current brand names) for something that’s still exciting
But the really interesting question is whether the advance of the social web will be fast enough that this effect actually induces people to abandon things like Facebook or Twitter or whether new generations of “traditional social media early adopters” will simply decide not to sign up for the services their parents use.