How today’s teens use the Internet, email and instant messaging

For any web marketers in the United States, The Pew Internet & American Life Project is a dream come true. The non-profit research center studies the social effects of the Internet on American and is known (as well as regularly cited in conference presentations or articles) as one of the best sources of research reports in the field.

The fact that these reports are available online for free doesn’t hurt either.

The research center is also a master in communication, as it always manages to get its name in the offline and online media all year long by releasing a report every few weeks on timely topics.

This week, the non-profit organization has published its latest report: “Teens and Technology: Youth are Leading the Transition to a Fully Wired and Mobile Nation”. As usual, the PDF version of this 57-page report can be downloaded for free.

This report data was collected in October and November 2004 via telephone interviews among a random sample of 1,100 pairs of teens (12-17) and a parent or guardian. The margin of error is less than 4%.

In other words, the report presents a pretty reliable picture of the technology use of American teens, our future students.

The report is a must-read for any web marketer in higher education (share the link with your favorite person in Marketing or Admissions, you’ll make friends ;-)

Here are my notes about this report:

• We work on the right medium to reach our prospective and current students: “87% of U.S. teens aged 12-17 use the internet, up from 73% in 2000. […] There are now approximately 11 million teens who go online daily, compared to about 7 million in 2000.”
• If the college admission process were a game — literally –, your admission office could rely entirely on the Web to do its job: “When compared to adults, teens are more than twice as likely to play games online; 81% of online teens say they are gamers, compared to 32% of online adults who say this.”
• The Web is a major news provider for teens: “76% get news online. That represents about 16 million people and signifies growth of 38% in the number of teens getting news online since 2000.”
• Instant messaging has become the teen killer application to communicate with friends: “75% of online teens — or about two-thirds of all teenagers — use instant messaging, compared to 42% of online adults.” However, your admission office shouldn’t drop email altogether as “teens who participated in focus groups for this study said that they view email as something you use to talk to “old people,” institutions, or to send complex instructions to large groups.”
• You should provide easy to remember short web addresses to your website or admission web areas for 2 reasons: “50% of IM-using teens have included a link to an interesting or funny article or website in an instant message” and “most teens use shared computers at home and growing numbers log on from libraries, school, and other locations.” When it’s not your personal computer, bookmarking a website isn’t really an option.
• And, last but not least: you really work on the right medium as “teens are also more inclined to use the internet to get information about a prospective school; 57% of online teens use the internet to search for a school they might attend, while 45% of online adults do this.”

Make sure you use this data about the Net-Generation to back up your projects and get the budget you deserve.