With only 8pct of American teens taking to regular tweets, a new report has revealed that microblogging has not yet caught the fancy of teens in the West.

According to the report, from the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project, experts have suggested that the difference is that most teens want to socialize with their friends and peers, not broadcast to the larger world.

"Most teens are not interested in being truly public," the Washington Post quoted Danah Boyd, a researcher with Microsoft Research and a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, as saying.

She says that even though Twitter allows users to limit their circle of friends, it is "fundamentally a public system", and teens "look at this and say, 'Is this the best tool for doing what I want?'"

The report also found that older teens are more likely than younger ones to use Twitter, and that high school girls are the most interested, with 13 percent using Twitter, compared with 7 percent of boys the same age.

Researchers say most Twitter-minded teens follow the tweets of celebrities -- be it Miley Cyrus, Lance Armstrong, Chad Ochocinco, Shaquille O'Neal or Ashton Kutcher.