Insightful Social Media Demographics

A co-worker was asking about recent social media stats this week so we did some digging. Here's the latest and greatest in terms of what social media sites are used most heavily, what age groups are dominating social media and what they want.

Most popular social sites:

• Facebook with more than 400 million active users
• Twitter with 75 million+ registered users (although we know not all users are active). Twitter estimates 50 million tweets per day are being sent by its members
• LinkedIn with more than 60 million users
• MySpace with close to 60 million users

Age Groups:

A recent study by Royal Pingdom pulled together statistics for 19 different social networks including the popular sites listed above plus some of the second tier sites including Hi5, FriendFeed, Tagged, etc. The results show the age group usage of social media as follows:

• 35-55 = 25%
• 45-54 = 19%
• 25-34 = 18%
• 0-17 = 15%
• 55-64 = 10%
• 18-24 = 9%
• 65+ = 3%

When looking at Facebook and Twitter's heavy users, the percentages of users 35 or older exceeds 60%. Bebo and MySpace as expected are made up largely of younger audiences aged 17 or younger with 35-45% falling into that age group.

Other interesting social age stats:

• Average LinkedIn user is 44
• Average Twitter user is 39
• Average Facebook user is 38
• Average MySpace user is 31
• Average Bebo user is 28

Social Content:

Online advertising network Chitika analyzed the interests of social networking sites. The results seem consistent with what we know:

• Myspace Users are generally interested in: video games (28%), Celebs and entertainment (23%), Business and Law (10%), Tech and Community (tied at 8%) and other (23%).

• Facebook Users are generally interested in: News (28%), Community and Other (tied at 17%), How to/DIY (13%), Shopping and Celebs/Entertainment (tied at 9%), Tech (7%).

• Twitter Users are generally interested in: News (47%), Other (23%), Tech and Celebs/Entertainment (tied at 10%), Movies (6%) and How to/DIY (4%).