We simply cannot stop talking about social media. It runs our businesses, puts new opportunities into our lives, and helps connect us to those we love as well as those who we only met once.
If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world with over 500 million registered users. With that kind of market, businesses are made around these networks. With livelihoods built around it, we need to know who is using it to find target audiences.
Pew Internet has done several such studies, the latest statistics came out at the end of March 2012.
Here are a few graphs.
You can download the full report here, but here are the highlights.
- In May 2011, 69% of women were users of social networking sites, compared with 60% of men.
- Women are also more active in their use of these sites, with more than half of female internet users using social networking sites on a typical day (54%), compared with 42% of male internet users.
- Fully 95% of all teens ages 12-17 are now online and 80% of those online teens are users of social media sites.
- Users under age 30 are significantly more likely to use social networking sites when compared with every other adult age group. As of May 2011, over eight in ten internet users ages 18-29 use social networking sites (83%), compared with seven in ten 30-49 year-olds (70%), half of 50-64 year-olds (51%), and a third of those age 65 and older (33%).
- 63% of social networking site users have deleted people from their “friends” lists, up from 56% in 2009;
Where do you fall in line with this research?
April says
It will be interesting to watch these numbers change as the current younger generation gets older.
Eric Dye says
I agree.