With one of my many passions being education, I spend a ton of time interacting with students and their educators. While my day job doesn’t allow me to do it quite as much as I would like I use my personal time, including a ton of time on social media, to meet students “where they are” when it comes to trying to understand them and the challenges they face. And quite frankly, I use the term “they” kind of loosely…I’m in my mid-20’s officially, but it still doesn’t feel like quite that long ago that I was where they were, worrying about the same things they were, whether it was my first big-boy job, moving away to college, losing all of my high school friends…the worry list could go on…

This month, I’ll be working on quite a few new contracts and speaking engagements, focusing on high school graduations for this summer. In order to deliver meaningful messages and really connect with these audiences, I’ve realized that it’s always best to do a little “research.” I occasionally will do some internet-based research outside of the social interactions that I have with students, most of whom are in middle and high school. I always lean on the social interactions, and I hardly ever take what I find on the internet as the overall truth…but this time is different. This guy hit the nail on the freakin’ head.

That’s why this particular article really fascinated me. It’s a long-form article and truly sincere breakdown of what this particular teenager and his peer think about the various forms of social media.

It’s funny because, for example, with Facebook – that’s definitely my “generation’s” form of social media. One of my parents came on board last year, every single one of my college friends has it, and uses it in an engaged way. But most of the students that I worked with during my graduate school years (who are graduating college in the next year or 2) use Instagram , just as he described. On the other hand, many of the high school students I interact with use Snapchat with each other. They ALL use Tumblr in exactly the way he described – without a firm identity. We all use WhatsApp to communicate with friends while they are away in another country where cell phone service would be radically expensive.

And I’m over here like “Forget all that. Can’t you just iMessage me?” Social media sure can be inundating sometimes!

And finally, although not as relevant to youth, the video below is one of my annual favorites. Although the 2014 iteration, in my humble opinion, isn’t as great as past versions it still provides a great visual and very updated statistics on how we are all interacting with social media (with a slight focus on advertising and marketing) as we are smack dab in the middle of the digital age.

Read the article above and then check out the video below!