Old Gimmers Sink Their Gums into Twitter

There are times I hate social media. It’s never the tool itself but the ravenous tugging at the cool tool-du-jour’s carcass by the various vultures surrounding it.

Twitter is one such carcass – a fleshy one, but it’s still being picked over nonetheless.

Some awful twaddle is being talked about Twitter, but when I saw this headline in The Guardian this morning I didn’t know whether to hurl or hurl my monitor.

Moldova forces regain control of parliament after ‘Twitter revolution’

Besides the headline, the only mention of Twitter came in the form of this lone sentence.

One analyst called the uprising a “Twitter revolution”.

THAT. IS. IT. (I’d link to it, but they don’t even deserve a nofollow – just search for the title if you must.)

No argument or name supporting the claim – not even a link to the tweet that was obviously the guy’s source as ‘analyst’ (and I’m maybe being kind in that assumption). Still, with daily cries of the death of newspapers, you can’t blame them for squeezing in a little Twitter morsel to try and up those page views.

There may be other reasons that compound your hatred of Twitter besides the incessant hype. All this technical talk can remind you of your own shortcomings and leave you burdened with the thought of learning a new skill set in the vain attempt of jumping on another bandwagon. Not only that, but you’re probably thinking all this social media stuff is for the young ‘uns, which only exacerbates your feelings of technical impotence.

Not so fast meine Damen und Herren.

A Comscore study out yesterday highlights us old fogeys as its key user base.

[…] 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.

Even the 65+ age group is adopting Twitter at a faster rate than so-called ‘early adopters’. Comscore goes on to explain why this might be the case:

The skew towards older visitors, although perhaps initially surprising for a social media site, actually makes more sense than you might think at first. With so many businesses using Twitter, along with the first generations of Internet users “growing up” and comfortable with technology, this is a sign that the traditional early adopter model might need to be revisited. Not only teenagers and college students can be counted among the “technologically inclined,” which means that trends are much more prone to take off in older age segments than they used to.

So there you go. Old folks are the new early adopters.

If you’re feeling slightly emboldened by finding yourself at the cutting edge of the Web, I could spew out one of those posts listing the 48 best tools/tips/practices for using Twitter.

But I won’t. It’s hardly a decent enough reason.

However, I will point you in the direction of Twitscoop, which shows all the trending subjects being talked about on Twitter at any given moment in real time. You can watch the terms ebb and flow as more or less people mention them. Simply putting your cursor over any of the terms will bring up the latest few tweets to put them in context. And at least one should have a link to take you to a full story somewhere.

You can watch the Web’s very own ticker tape morph before your very eyes on any topic whatsoever.

Then, once you’ve done that, do a search for your business, the products you sell, or terms related to your industry and see if anybody’s been talking about those.

That should give you something to chew on. 😉