If you were to believe the media – no not us – you would believe that teenage girls spend their life on Facebook, discussing the date, time and locations of the latest sales. Well according to Euro RSCG Worldwide -WARNING It’s a PR firm – they’re actually on the phone doing it instead, and the best route to a teenager’s cash is via their mobile.
The 32-page sisterhood survey (warning it may only be 32 pages but it’s also a 50Mb downloadable PDF) is a survey of about 100 teenage girls with the addition of some Nielsen data and it’s got some great findings. That’s if you can cope with a 100 person sample size.
Here’s just a small glimpse of the findings
For teenage girls, social media and social relationships reinforce each other—almost 8 in 10 use social media to keep in touch with friends.Three-quarters say they are in “constant contact” with friends via text (Nielsen reports that teens send a daily average of 96 text messages), Facebook, iChat, AIM or other social media sites or services.
The goings-on at school or among their friends dominate these communications. More than half (51 percent) say they use social networking sites to keep up with school gossip, while 54 percent fear missing out on important gossip or social events if they are not in “constant communication” with friends.
“Constant communication,” however, does not mean teenage girls are permanently online; they dip in and out.They surf the Web and use social media with a high degree of focus, making quick checks of Facebook, sending lightning-fast IM chats and posting short messages across online social media platforms.They search rather than browse and actively communicate rather than passively consume.