First of, I really have to commend the folks at Royal Pingdom for coming up with such a comprehensive study on the demographics of social network users. It’s a pretty good study with just about enough statistics that will really give you a good grasp of who are really into social networking today. So, what do they find out? Majority of the social network users are predominantly middle-aged folks who belong to the 35-44, not that tech savvy youngsters that we may all have thought before this study.
The study took stock of site demographics information for the United States which they gathered using Google’s Ad Planner service and then made additional calculations to come up with their final data. The report includes age data of members from 19 social networking sites including -Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, Digg, Slashdot, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Friendster, Last.fm, Friendfeed, LiveJournal, Hi5, Tagged, Ning, Xanga, Classmates.com and Bebo.
So, some interesting highlights of the report include:
- 25% of social network users belong to the 35-44 age group
- 3% of social network users belong to the 65-older group
- 65% of the users are in using Twitter and/or Facebook
- Bebo and MySpace are both widely used by users age 17 or younger
Those were just some of the key findings of the report. If you want to learn more, just check out Royal Pingdom.
Meanwhile, what really puzzles me is the fact that if the predominant users of Facebook are age 35-44 how come I still see tons of Mafia updates, senseless trivia questions, virtual gifts and other utterly unimportant stuff from my Facebook contacts? Does this mean that Facebook users are into the site not for business and social networking purposes but rather to while away time? Where is the maturity there, friends?