A Brief Look at Social Media Demographics
Sherri Deatherage Green
Editorial Manager
The Internet’s only constant is change. Today’s new frontier may be left in the dust tomorrow.
For example, social media has long since left the early adopter stage and is well on its way to maturity, with some sites further along the path than others. Each serves its own distinct user group.
FrogDog analyzed some of the most popular sites using data from Quantcast and other sources. We came away with some useful insights. For example, we found that monthly usage of Facebook and Twitter spiked in the first four months of 2009, while LinkedIn grew more slowly and MySpace declined.
With more than 91 million visitors a month, the truly social Facebook clearly leads the pack. Quantcast lists it as the fifth most popular Web site overall, trailing only the leading search engines. Other social media sites in the top ten are YouTube at seventh place and MySpace at ninth.
Facebook enjoys broad appeal, especially among younger users. Their parents seem to be logging on as well. Seventy-four percent of users are younger than 35 and nearly half have kids younger than 18. The majority of visitors are college graduates, and nearly 60 percent have household incomes over $60,000.
Facebook also seems “stickier” than some of its competitors. Quantcast classifies only 34 percent of Facebook users as “passers by.” Ninety-seven percent of Facebook’s traffic comes from 66 percent of its users, representing a total audience of 60 million consistent visitors.
In contrast to feature-rich Facebook, Twitter focuses on one thing: broadcasting 140-character messages to followers. A number of applications exist to help users attract the right followers and manage their “tweets,” but everything revolves around those short information blasts.
Twitter aficionados are extremely loyal to the site, which allows marketers to establish interest-based followings more easily than Facebook “friend” networks. Advertising Age recently reported that Facebook is attempting to address this disadvantage by giving users the option of making their status updates public.
Twitter grew quickly from 2 million monthly visitors to a peak of more than 23 million in a six-month time span, but user statistics began to decline in May. Its audience represents a fairly even distribution of income levels. But a Participation Marketing Network study showed that so far, Twitter isn’t gaining ground among the younger generation (only 6 percent of users are younger than 18), and Nielsen reported that 60 percent of Twitter visitors in one month didn’t return the next month. Twenty-eight percent of Twitter’s users (6.1 million people) account for 76 percent of its traffic.
Think of LinkedIn as the business networking luncheon of social media sites. LinkedIn is all about keeping up with and building business contacts, and recruiters use this to their advantage.
Of the three sites profiled here, LinkedIn is the only one that skews male (57 percent). Its users are older (81 percent over 35), more affluent (66 percent have incomes over $60,000), and more educated (81 percent have college degrees). Also, nearly two-thirds of LinkedIn’s users live outside the United States .
Figuring out which social marketing sites will reach a company’s target audience is only part of the battle. Marketers must learn the intricacies of each and how to package key messages in low-key, noncommercial ways that appeal to social media users. And we must always be on the lookout for the next big thing. After all, what’s cool today may be just plain cold tomorrow.
