10 Things we learned at the Post-16 Conference

This week we were asked by the Basingstoke Consortium to speak at their annual Post-16 Conference, which sees students from Queen Mary's College and Basingstoke College of Technology come together at Central Studios to discuss technology and business issues that affect them. We were running two social media workshops during the day, an interactive session over lunch and sat on the expert panel for a Q&A session later in the day.

It was a great day and we met some fantastic people, both from the world of business and students too, each with their own unique viewpoint on all our discussions. It also turns out that we thought we knew about the social media habits of this particular age-group was wrong in several areas.

Here's 10 things we learned yesterday:

1.  The average online human attention span is now only 8 seconds.

2.  On a daily basis 4.6 billion pieces of content are produced online.

3.  On average we check our phones 110 times per day.

4.  The majority of students we spoke to have Facebook, but don't use Facebook, because their parents do.

5.  Whilst they had all heard of it, only a handful of students use Twitter as the rest 'don't get it'.

6.  Students prefer messaging platforms like Snapchat and WhatsApp to chat and group chat.

7.  All of the students we spoke to have never used Instagram to take a selfie, a picture of a pet, or a picture of a meal. More than half         don't even have an Instagram account.

8.  The vast majority of students don't write or read blogs, claiming they're boring.

9.  The most used platform amongst everyone we spoke to was YouTube.

10. None of the students knew who actress Elizabeth Hurley or musician Carl Barat were. Despite both of them having attended college       in Basingstoke!