Why blogs are a great way to communicate with teens

According to the report “Teen Content Creators and Consumers” published yesterday by The Pew Internet & American Life Project, “Teens are much more likely than adults to blog and they are also more likely to read blogs.”

Want some hard numbers?

• 19% of online youth ages 12-17 have created their own blog. That is approximately four million people.
• 38% of all online teens, or about 8 million young people, say they read blogs.

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%.

This means that the proportions of teens blogging and reading blogs are probably even bigger one year later.

This 29-page free report available as a PDF file offers other very interesting findings about blogging teens:

• Older girls ages 15-17 are the most likely to blog; 25% of online girls in this age group keep a blog, compared with 15% of older boys who are online.
• Teens who go online frequently are more than twice as likely to blog; 27% of daily users have their own blog, compared with 11% of those who go online several times a week, and 10% of those who go online less often.
• Bloggers are more likely than non-bloggers to engage in everyday online activities such as getting news, using IM or making online purchases, but content creating and sharing activities are the areas where bloggers are far ahead of non-bloggers.
• Teens from households with higher incomes ($50,000 and up) and higher levels of parental education are more likely to read blogs than teens from low socioeconomic status homes. About 42% of teens in households earning more than $50,000 annually report reading the blogs of others, compared with less than a third (30%) of teens from lower income households.
• More than half (57%) of teen bloggers update their blogs once a week or more, and nearly three in ten (29%) update at least three times a week.
• For teens, blogs are much more about the maintenance and extension of personal relationships. When teens do read blogs, they mainly read the blogs of people they know. About 62% of blog-reading teens say they only read the blogs of people they know.

The report also deals with teens as content consumers.

So, it is definitely worth a read.
Don’t forget to share it with your favorite person in your admission or PR office, that’s always a good way to make friends (and help them understand – if necessary – how important the online world has become in the life of our prospective and current students as well as how blogs can be used for recruiting purposes)