Last month, we published a Social Media Guide for Local Government. At the end of the guide, we included a two question survey for feedback. One of the survey questions asked:  "What else would you like to know about social media?"

One survey responder wanted to know:  "More facts about the usage, percentages of how regularly individuals use it, age groups, races, social classes etc. Who are the big social media users? And how can we target those groups?"

Great question and somewhat tricky. It's a bit difficult to come up with absolute and vetted numbers for these things without paying a lot of money, but there are ways to get an idea of trends. With a focus on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, the following information can help in understanding the large and constantly changing landscape of social media demographics.

Facebook

Facebook has been noted as the most popular social media tool to date. In fact, Facebook has recently passed Google in website hits. The latest statistics from Facebook tell us that there are more than 400 million active users, 50% of which log on to Facebook in any given day. The average user has 130 friends and people spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook.
Get more Facebook statistics at: (http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics):

There are a couple of organizations that have some useful tracking mechanisms to explain more about Facebook users.

istrategylabs (http://www.istrategylabs.com/) has been tracking Facebook’s growth since October 2007, which shows the growth rates of various user bases in Facebook over the one year period from 1/4/2009 to 1/4/2010. There has been highest growth in 35-54, and 55+ age groups between January '09 - January '10.

Quantcast (http://www.quantcast.com/) is a team of web analytics experts building statistical technology to understand digital media audiences. Their main audience is advertising, but the demographic information can be useful to public organizations. More recent data from Quantcast shows a large Facebook audience in the 18-34 age group, in the African American group, and in users with children between 0-17 years old.

Go to http://www.quantcast.com/wd:com.facebook#demographics for more detail.

Twitter

The Pew Internet and American Life Project (http://www.pewinternet.org/) released a study in September 2009, that shows greater use by women than men, the age group 18-29 is the largest, and most use via wireless.

More recent data from Quantcast shows an even larger spread between male and female, with female users at 55%.

Go to http://www.quantcast.com/twitter.com/demographics for more detail

YouTube

The YouTube user base has a broad age range, 18-55, evenly divided between males and females, and spanning all geographies. Fifty-one percent of YouTube users go to YouTube weekly or more often, and 52 percent of 18-34 year-olds share videos often with friends and colleagues. For more information, go to ( http://www.youtube.com/t/fact_sheet).

Recent data from Quantcast shows much growth in the 13-17 age group and a much greater use in the African American, Asian and Hispanic groups.

Go to http://www.quantcast.com/youtube.com/demographics for more detail

More Information

A recent survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project (http://www.pewinternet.org/) tells us that most internet users have visited a government website to get information or complete a transaction in the preceding year. For the complete study, go to: http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Government-Online.aspx

The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) recently released a report on Social Media and Technology Use Among Adults 50+ (http://www.aarp.org/technology/social-media/info-06-2010/socmedia.html).

Their findings include:

• Two out of five (40%) adults age 50 and over consider themselves extremely (17%) or very (23%) comfortable using the Internet.  One out of five (21%) Hispanic adults age 50 and over consider themselves extremely (6%) or very (15%) comfortable using the Internet.
• The majority of those 50+ who access the Internet do so from a desktop computer (57%).  One-quarter use a laptop (26%), 4 percent use smartphones/Blackberries, 4 percent use mobile phones, and one-quarter (27%) do not access the Internet.  The majority of Hispanic adults 50+ say they do not access the Internet (55%).
• Approximately one-quarter of all those 50+ use social media websites (27%) with Facebook being by far the most popular (23%).  Approximately one-fifth of all Hispanics 50+ use social media websites (21%) with Facebook being the most popular (13%). 

Next month we will answer another social media question from our feedback survey.