Social Networks Demographics

Social Network demographics can be very useful for individuals and businesses that are looking into where to focus their efforts.

MySpace

Although MySpace was not the original social network, I do give it credit for helping make social networks mainstream.

According to OperationRedState, as of May 2009, MySpace had an estimated 64 Million users.  That number is difficult to ignore.

Furthermore, 14% of the users are Hispanic - which I thought was interesting.

Facebook

In January of 2009, Facebook announced that it had exceeded 150 million users worldwide.

Almost 50% of Facebook’s users are in the 18 - 34 age bracket, although the ages that are showing the largest growth is the baby boomers.  For example, as of August 2009, people 55 years of age and older accounted for 25% of Facebook’s growth.

As of October of 2009, Facebook has 300 million users.

YouTube

YouTube gets 81 million views a month in the US alone.  The demographics of YouTube users were surprising similar to that of Facebook.  However, I haven’t heard any reports of a growing number of baby boomer users like Facebook.

An interesting fact about YouTube was that almost 50% of the website’s users did not have a college education, but high schoolers only made up about 20% of that.

Twitter

Twitter has probably seen the fastest amount of growth.  Between March and May, it was reported that Twitter doubled its users, reaching 23 million users.  Also, Twitter’s users seem to be evenly split between household income brackets.

“$0 to 30k : 22%, 30 to 60k : 28%, 60 to 100k : 23%, 100k+ : 27%”

Final Thoughts

The most interesting thing I found about social network demographics is that every site is almost split 50/50 between male and female users.

Another thing that I haven’t been able to wrap my head around yet, is that even though most social networks had a thriving population of users between the ages 18 and 34, most of the websites have not been profitable.  This seems nonsensical since that age range is typically a marketers ideal demographic.  I’m sure with Twitter’s recent 1 Billion dollar valuation and with Facebook finally earning a profit, that we are well on our way to learning how to monetize social networks.

Social Networks are Rewriting Advertising Book of Rules

Source: massimobarbieri

Social Networks are rewriting the rules of online advertising.  These changes are being caused by the overwhelming number of users that these sites are receiving and the portability of content over the web with the creation of technologies such as Facebook Connect and and MySpaceID.

From the article:

The change is taking place on social networking sites, where new applications and cross-site partnerships are turning the likes of Facebook and MySpace into one-stop shops for hundreds of millions of users–platforms from which all the Web’s offerings can be reached.

More important, in the next wave of development for such sites, new tools will allow members to take their social-media identities with them when they go to other Web sites. Once wedded to a single networking platform, a member’s “social graph”–password, profile, list of friends–is becoming portable. In other words, as they surf the Web, users increasingly will be able to define themselves by their social network of origin.

That’s big. It signals that Web companies are no longer in a race to build “destination sites” that attract vast numbers of users. Instead, social networking players are racing to extend their influence over the entire Web by exporting their social features to all sites.

…

Advertisers, meanwhile, may eventually stop buying specific ad space on the Web and go after users, wherever they pop up, based on their social profiles and networks.

Read the full article at BusinessWeek