While the 18-24 year old demographic is almost entirely on one social network or another according to a study by the Participatory Media Network — 99 percent to be exact — only a little over a fifth of this group is using Twitter.

The study was released at TWTRCON ’09 in San Francisco, which if you didn’t know (and why didn’t you!) Technologizer’s own Harry McCracken was the “official Twitterer.”

Of this group, 85 percent follow their friends, 54 percent follow celebrities, and 29 percent follow both family and companies. PMN says that this highlights that there is room to grow Twitter as a “marketing vehicle,” but as Caroline McCarthy at Cnet seems to argue on the flipside companies have already been using the microblogging service for marketing purposes for quite awhile.

She seems to say that this isn’t the best news for these folks, and I’d tend to agree. Maybe companies have overestimated the desire for a deeper connection to their customers, and the demand isn’t there. In any case, its all still fairly new so it might be too early to judge just yet.

Regardless, Twitter seems to have quite the untapped potential customer base in this ever increasingly connected demographic. It will be interesting to see what this means for its future. It’s clear the company is going to have to continue to invest in infrastructure as these folks come online — it also could mean Mr. Failwhale may become an ever more increasing visitor to us already dealing with Twitter’s not-so-stellar record of uptime.

 
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