IU College Students and Twitter Usage

One of my roommates just told me about how a guy she likes has a twitter account. She herself has a twitter account that she never updates, but instead only follows friends, news, and companies on it. It got me to think about the different ways students use Twitter that I have noticed at IU (among my friends).

I feel many of my friends follow companies such as J Crew and Forever 21 on Twitter, and are fans of them on Facebook. In that way, they can find out about any deals going on at the store. When it comes to following other people, though, I feel it's much more common just to follow one's close friends. Unlike on Facebook, you don't want to be hounded by someone's constant tweets if you've only met that person a couple of times.

Speaking of constant tweeting, I feel that relentless tweeting is more common among adults in the workforce than any of my friends here at IU. I could only name a handful of my friends who update their Twitter more than once per day. With that, many of my friends update so rarely that they have not tweeted anything new since last August (most likely from the increase of academic responsibilities). I'm more of a "couple times per month" type tweeter usually, because I don't think to go on Twitter often, or update from my phone. In fact, I still have not taken the time to figure out how to use twitpic to submit pictures from my Blackberry. I find it interesting that college students love Facebook, but are basically "late adaptors" when it comes to Twitter. You'd think that with a lifestyle so on-the-go, college students would be even more likely to use Twitter than their office drone counterparts. However, that is not the case (based on my experience of course, with no real research to back up my claims).

I've embedded the Twitter account that corresponds with this blog into the side panel on my blog page. It appears that sometimes the widget doesn't work, but hopefully the kinks have been worked out.