More than 42 per cent of T&T's 18-35-year-olds spend more than 11 hours a week con­sum­ing dig­i­tal me­dia.These are among the find­ings of a sur­vey com­mis­sioned by Caribbean Ideas, the dig­i­tal busi­ness so­lu­tions com­pa­ny which was be­hind the Caribbean Dig­i­tal Ex­po con­fer­ence, on the Dig­i­tal Habits and Prac­tices of Young Trinidad & To­ba­go.

Co-founder and CEO Chike Far­rell not­ed: "That's at least 1?4 of a typ­i­cal work-week be­ing spent on these chan­nels, in­di­cat­ing the ex­tent to which dig­i­tal me­dia us­age is "al­ways-on" for a large num­ber of peo­ple in this seg­ment."This un­der­scores for mar­keters that a key por­tion of their tar­get cus­tomer base is lit­er­al­ly al­most al­ways ad­dress­able in some way via dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy, which cre­ates im­por­tant im­pli­ca­tions for mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy and bud­get al­lo­ca­tion."

The in-depth analy­sis pro­vides in­sight in­to how the dig­i­tal­ly-en­abled peo­ple spend their time an­swer­ing ques­tions like how much time they spend on­line, which so­cial me­dia plat­forms they fre­quent, what they do on those and oth­er sites and more.More than 2,000 peo­ple were sur­veyed in March and April of 2013, with a pri­ma­ry fo­cus on 16-34-year -olds, along with a small­er pop­u­la­tion of 35 to 44-year-olds for com­par­i­son pur­pos­es.

The re­cent­ly re­leased 2011 Cen­sus re­vealed that over 33 per cent of the na­tion's pop­u­la­tion are be­tween the ages of 15 and 34, which com­pris­es the ma­jor­i­ty of the fu­ture earn­ers and cus­tomer base for the na­tion's busi­ness­es, mak­ing this an im­por­tant seg­ment to un­der­stand for mar­keters and busi­ness lead­ers.

Far­rell said: "In the past three years, mar­keters in Trinidad and To­ba­go have in­creas­ing­ly turned to so­cial me­dia and dig­i­tal to reach their tar­get cus­tomers. They've been dri­ven there by pres­sures to spend bud­gets more cost-ef­fec­tive­ly, and the aware­ness of the in­creas­ing time their cus­tomers were spend­ing con­sum­ing me­dia dig­i­tal­ly (via the Web, mo­bile and so­cial me­dia)."

He said "the core in­sights that drove most busi­ness­es to in­vest more in dig­i­tal were a gen­er­al ob­ser­va­tion of shift­ing trends, and im­por­tant, but lim­it­ed sta­tis­tics, like the grow­ing num­ber of Face­book pro­files in Trinidad & To­ba­go and gen­er­al in­for­ma­tion on In­ter­net and mo­bile pen­e­tra­tion."The thing that's al­ways chal­lenged mar­keters is get­ting deep­er in­sight in­to ex­act­ly how young peo­ple are ac­tu­al­ly spend­ing their time when they're con­sum­ing dig­i­tal me­dia. That's been a big chal­lenge... un­til now."

Oth­er da­ta in fo­cus in the study in­clud­ed a dive in­to so­cial me­dia us­age in T&T. This coun­try has has been dubbed a "Face­book na­tion" in the past, and this plat­form not sur­pris­ing­ly leads with 97.3 per cent of the sur­veyed pop­u­la­tion stat­ing that they have a Face­book ac­count.Of in­ter­est to mar­keters and busi­ness­es, how­ev­er, will be that Twit­ter and YouTube are in­creas­ing­ly im­por­tant ways to in­ter­act with this au­di­ence, with 34 per cent and three per cent, re­spec­tive­ly, re­port­ing hav­ing ac­counts with these ser­vices.

Ra­mon Gre­go­rio, chief cu­rios­i­ty of­fi­cer at Lu­cent Re­search, ex­plained the need for the study."Where lo­cal me­dia con­sump­tion is con­cerned, there have been spe­cif­ic phe­nom­e­na of in­ter­est cen­tred around dig­i­tal be­hav­iour, which mar­keters have been at­tempt­ing to col­late on their own us­ing ex­ter­nal sites for ref­er­ence."It's al­ways been very dif­fi­cult to try to ex­plain be­hav­iour of spe­cif­ic lo­cal au­di­ence seg­ments, by ap­ply­ing for­eign sta­tis­tics in broad strokes to the lo­cal mar­ket.

"The Dig­i­tal Habits and Prac­tices study is an at­tempt to bridge this da­ta gap and paint a pic­ture that is ac­tu­al­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive of Trinidad and To­ba­go."This re­search study was com­mis­sioned by Caribbean Ideas and ex­e­cut­ed in part­ner­ship with in­de­pen­dent col­lec­tion and da­ta analy­sis com­pa­ny Saco­daServ, with re­sults re­view and re­port writ­ing by Lu­cent Re­search.

The study in­cludes in­for­ma­tion on time spent con­sum­ing dig­i­tal me­dia, so­cial me­dia us­age, most pop­u­lar ac­tiv­i­ties when con­sum­ing dig­i­tal me­dia, as well as sec­tions on mo­bile da­ta us­age and fi­nan­cial habits and dig­i­tal.The re­port be­comes avail­able for pur­chase from Caribbean Ideas on Tues­day and will pro­vide lo­cal mar­keters and busi­ness lead­ers with a lev­el of in­sight that is need­ed to add a lev­el of lo­cal ve­rac­i­ty to their in­vest­ments across the dig­i­tal di­vide.

In­ter­est­ed par­ties can vis­it www.caribbeanideas.com or call the com­pa­ny at 221-9782 for more de­tails.