ethnicomm – the blog part I

I came across this really interesting infographic on social media demographics and just had to share it!

As you can see, Facebook does have a lot more females than males but I was surprised to see MySpace up there as well. LinkedIn has the most educated users. What I would like to see is a cross-tabulation or cube of age/income/gender/education level. Any excel wizards out there?

Marketing decisions based on surveys can be dangerous if you don’t dig into the data to ensure that the insights gleaned are relevant. For example, a study by Anderson Analytics which is discussed in a ReadWriteWeb article, says a lot about social networkers and says very little! Part 2 of the article is even less informative IMHO.

photo credit: the.joberg

My issues:

• participants were paid to take the survey
• its Amerocentric
• it does not take the life cycle of the individual social networks into consideration

Twitter is relatively new and MySpace is old. The co-relationships between these networks will change over time as more people adopt Twitter and abandon MySpace. As users progress from college to the work world, LinkedIn will also become more important – it’s not a matter of what they like, it’s a question of what benefit they will get from that particular social network.

So, if you are thinking about social networks and where to place your precious ad dollars (or euros/rupees), you should ensure that you understand the data. Remember…numbers don’t lie but faulty interpretations of what those numbers mean could be hazardous to your (business) health.