Teens: Blogging Is, Like, For Old People
The study also found that Twitter isn't particularly popular among teens.
The study, which paints a portrait of how young adults are using online social media, is based on telephone interviews with 800 teens, age 12 to 17, in the U.S. conducted between June and September 2009.
The study found that blogging has declined in popularity among teens and young adults since an earlier survey. Today only 14 percent of online teens say they blog, down from 28 percent of teen Internet users in 2006. Even within social networking Web sites only 56 percent of teen social network users say they comment on friends' blogs, down from 76 percent in 2006.
The drop in teen blogging is in contrast to blogging among adults overall: Pew Research studies since 2005 have consistently found that roughly 1 in 10 online adults maintain a personal online journal or blog.
While the lack of interest in blogging is more pronounced among younger teens, the study also found that just 15 percent of online young adults, age 18 to 29, maintain a blog. That's down 9 points from 2007.
Seventy-three percent of online American teens now use social networking Web sites, up from 55 percent in late 2006 and 65 percent in early 2008, the survey found.
But interest in specific social networking site features has shifted. Fewer teens in 2009 sent daily messages to friends using SNS, bulletin, group message or private message functions on social networking sites compared to those who did in early 2008.
Young Internet users are more likely than adults to maintain a profile on MySpace (66 percent of all young adults, compared to only 36 percent of those 30 and older) than on Facebook (71 percent of all young adults compared to 75 percent of older profile owners).
The survey found that teens are not using Twitter in large numbers, making that online site an exception to teens' increasing use of other social networking sites. Only 8 percent of teens age 12 to 17 use Twitter, while older teens are more likely to use the site than their younger counterparts. High school girls are particularly likely to use Twitter " 13 percent of online girls age 14 to 17 use it compared to 7 percent of boys in that age group.