The Demographic Landscape of Social Networks

The world belongs to those who understand it. In the social media ecosphere, we at Strategic Objectives believe those who understand their audiences best have the highest likelihood of generating the best results. PRs need to understand how to tell a brand’s story and make it speak to audiences so effectively that the message can transcend all platforms and inspire sharing. PRs are natural communicators, but even here, you really need to understand your audience to maximize results.

Everyone is trying to figure out user behaviors online. Once we understand behaviors, we can better understand how to reach our target markets and build the best and highly-engaged online communities for our clients. What if we were to say most gamers have never been to college? What if we were to tell you there’s a strong use of social networking in the workplace?

Social Media Today recently released some statistics on social media usage and its demographic landscape. The statistics are deduced from 900 websites that average 9 million visits/month per site and offer some very valuable, not-so-surprising and nonetheless interesting results on user data. That data can be found in the chart below, where we have also created a quick summary of the research findings.

Demographic Findings:

• Social networking is dominated by younger generations with no children, and online networking activity picks up in college
• Social networks are most popular among the youngest generation (18-34) and are used less frequently for each successive age group over 35
• Youth ages 18-24 tend to use social networks to supplement social life, learning, and having fun.
• The most diverse use of social networks comes from the 25-34 year old age group.
  • Continue to use the services they used in college, but less often
  • As they start to have new interests (business, family), they are most likely to use online social engagement to benefit their business/career, discuss or plan travels, and share family-related experiences online
• The 35+ demographic show technological bias against social networking.
  • High likeliness of these age groups to use business, family, and dating networks
  • Stats also suggest that social networking’s popularity among youth may be not just be due to technological differences, but to a better fit of interests
• People with college-level education tend to have a higher rate of social for participation with networks across the board.
  • This suggest the expanding network once in college
  • Also demonstrates there is a tremendous amount of information shared between students

Outlier Findings: Two categories break this trend

• Gaming has an unusually high participation rate among people without college experience
  • Likely that a high percentage of gamers are young
• Places has a very high participation rate among people with graduate-level schooling
  • Likely positive correlation between graduate school and income, and between income and travel.

Male VS Female Findings:

• Gaming is strongly dominated by males
• Lifestyle and family is strongly dominated by females
• Dating, Places, and Business are used more often by females
• Education networks are used most by males

Location Findings:

• Strong use of social networks in the workplace
  • Distraction or sign of increasing application of social websites for practical purposes?