As everyone floats through the social networking and media landscape trying to find their niche, it is easy to see why news-oriented people might be drawn to Twitter while those with a desire for DIY projects and landscape pictures might find a home on Pinterest, but there are even more nuances and demographics that might interest those traversing the online ecosphere. When companies are trying to decide where to spend their time and energy marketing their products, services and projects, knowing the age, gender and interests of social media sites can be the difference in exponential customer acquisition.
Pingdom, an uptime and performance monitoring service, looked at Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Reddit, Hacker News, Slashdot, Github, Stack Overflow, Orkut, Quora, WordPress.com, Blogger, Flickr, Myspace, Tagged, and several other services to see just who is using these services.
Across all social media platforms, the average age distribution is as follows:
This means that more than half of the social media users are in the key demographic of 25 and 44 years old.
Companies looking for a younger audience to target and market to may want to look at the content and audience captured by sites like deviantART, HackerNews, Reddit and Tumblr, whereas companies looking to get a more mature and, usually spendy audiencemight be more interested in advertising on LinkedIn, Yelp, Facebook, Flicker or Pinterest.
You can see below just what the age breakdown is for these sites:
The companies with the most people in the 35 and older crowd are Twitter (with 55%), Pinterest (with 63%), Facebook (with 65%) and LinkedIn (with 79%).
Remember when Facebook was just for the young 20s crowd? It looks like social media hasn't just widened, it has matured, but it is still important to point out that only 2% of social media users are 65 or older on average.
It also might be beneficial to notice what the average age of social media users are:
Gender
In marketing it isn't just age that is a determining factor on whether people are in the target demographic, and thus more likely to buy products advertised -- gender is a big element to look at as well. And while males and females are both signing up and using social media at fairly close rates (males make up 48.75% of the users and females are edging them out a bit with 51.25%), some sites are gaining users in one gender far faster than the other.
In fact, 17 out of 24 sites have more female than male users. The sites that are attracting more females include the photo-centric site Pinterest followed by the bookish Goodreads, then Blogger, Tagged, Tumblr and MySpace. The male-friendly sites include Slashdot, Hacker News, Stack Overflow, Github, Orkut, Redit and Quora.
The sites with a fairly even distribution are Last.fm, LiveJournal and LinkedIn. Surprisingly enough, Facebook and Twitter both have the same gender distribution (40% male and 60% female).
