Young people, mobile websites and social media

08 October 2009

Cimex recently conducted an online survey to gather information from hundreds of users of the IdeasTap website, a creative network and funding body for emerging arts talent.

We wanted to find out more about what users felt about the site, and to help us prioritise recommendations for the next stage of site development. We chose an online survey of the members of the site as a useful tool in gathering large amounts of data in a short amount of time.

The overall aims of the survey were to gather information about users’ preferences and requirements of the site, and also to gain valuable insights into users’ mobile internet usage.

Of the 668 respondents, 70% fell between the 17 to 25 age bracket, a typical representative sample of the users of the site. It is the results from these respondents we have included in this report to gain an insight into this younger age group.

A large amount (64%) of these respondents were based in Greater London, with others a spread from across all regions of the UK.

Use of mobile

Particularly interesting points of the survey were the insights Cimex gained into the use of mobile internet. The most common makes of handsets the respondents used were Nokia (29%), Sony Ericsson (19%), Samsung (17%) and iPhone (11%).

When questioned, 43% of 17-25 year olds said they used their mobile phones to access the internet.

The five most popular reasons for them using the internet on a mobile phone were (in order of popularity):

• Email
• Social networking
• News
• Directions
• Applications

This reinforces what we already know - that the mobile internet is an extremely important area for engaging with users in an increasingly mobile environment. Read more about our research into user behaviour on mobile sites.

Social networking

As could be predicted, social networks were popular with this age group, with a huge 95% of respondents saying they use Facebook. Twitter was also popular amongst the sample, with 31% using it, 20% using MySpace and 7% using LinkedIn, the social network for professional use.

When asked if they used social networks for Friends, professionals or both, the majority of the sample use them for both reasons.

This reflects users’ responses regarding what they want to use the IdeasTap site for; to connect with people with similar interests to them and also industry professionals that can help their career and employment opportunities.

Users were also asked the interesting question of ‘If you could create a brand new social networking website yourself what are the three key things you would want it to do?’ and the responses were extremely interesting and varied.

Many people did offer some insights as to what is of most interest to them, with the most popular themes centering around connecting to people with similar interests (in this case what the respondents particular interest in the Arts is). They wanted to be able to promote themselves to produce career opportunities and collaborate with other people, and having a platform that helped and enabled them to this would be highly useful.

Overall this survey gave us the opportunity to gather user insights which are highly useful in driving the project forward, and this article presents just a small snippet of the useful information we can add to our knowledge of the target audience.

For more insight, download our PDF: ‘What are young people’s attitudes to mobile and social media?‘

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