You may have heard or read about the statistics on the ages of Twitter users, which interestingly show that teenagers (and those a little bit older) do not make up much of the Twitterverse.

Whilst Twitter’s footprint has grown since the beginning of 2009, teenagers are still only a small percentage of people who are active Twitter users. The Nielsen Company has been following the growth of Twitter users in 2009, and specifically segments these users by age:

The survey was administered to over 250 000 Internet users in the USA. As you can see, the number of people in the 2 - 24 age group grew quite a bit in the first six months of this year. A more recent study by Brian Solis, the PR 2.0 guru, supported these statistics, and showed that the majority of Twitter users are over the age of 18 but are younger than 49.

So why don’t young people Tweet? It appears as though there are a number of reasons:

Geoff Cook, founder of the social networking site myYearbook has also been closely studying Twitter trends this year. A study of his looked at why teens don’t like using Twitter, and here is what they had to say:

“It’s lame” came up as the most popular reason for not using Twitter. This may come from a lack of understanding of what Twitter is used for, or that there are just not enough teens on Twitter yet for them to have any friends to follow or Tweet at. 

The CEO of Twitter, Evan Williams, was recently interviewed by Fortune (reported on CNN Money), and his thoughts are that it is more or less a good thing for the Twitter business that there are not as many teenagers on Twitter as there are adults. He says, “Twitter is not a social network. The emphasis is on information and finding out what's happening among things you care about - work, industry, company, news. And it's well known that teenagers are not really consumers of news.” Not yet anyway.

Solis suspects that more teens will continue to sign up on Twitter, especially as there are more celebrities opening up their own Twitter accounts. What with the likes of Britney Spears (the 2nd most followed person on Twitter - can you believe it?) and the Jonas Brothers kicking up a storm on Twitter, it could just be a matter of time before the number of Twittering teens exceeds that of the grown-ups.