A new study conducted by Anderson Analytics is helping identify users’ likely interests, buying habits, media consumption and more for marketers.
Facebookers
There are 77 million Facebook users, according to the study, and Facebook users were almost completely average in their level of interest in most areas when compared with users of Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn. Out of 45 categories, only national news, sports, exercise, travel, and home and garden skewed even slightly higher than average, and then by only one or two percentage points.
“Facebook is average because it has the most users. When stat testing, anything near the average is less likely to be significant,” Mr. Anderson said. “They are also capturing a wider range of users for various reasons, from high-school and college fun, leisure user to business and parents and grandparents.”
They are more likely to be married (40%), white (80%) and retired (6%) than users of the other social networks. They have the second-highest average income, at $61,000, and an average of 121 connections.
Facebook users skew a bit older and are more likely to be late adopters of social media. But they are also extremely loyal to the site — 75% claim Facebook is their favorite site, and another 59% say they have increased their use of the site in the past six months.
Twitterers
This is the super-user group. Twitterers are more interested than the others in many subjects but skew particularly high in all news categories, restaurants, sports, politics, personal finance and religion. They also especially like pop culture, with music, movies, TV and reading, ranking higher than average. And their buying habits mirror that. They’re more likely to buy books, movies, shoes and cosmetics online than the other groups.
Twitterers are also entrepreneurial. They are more likely than others to use the service to promote their blogs or businesses. How do they keep going? Coffee, apparently. Some 31% buy coffee online, far above the average 21% of other social networkers.
They’re more likely to be employed part-time (16% vs. 11% average), have an average income of $58,000, and average 28 followers and 32 other Twitterers they’re following. They’re not particularly attached to the site, though — 43% said they could live without Twitter.
MySpacers
They are the young, the fun and the fleeing. While MySpace users skew younger, they also said they’d used the site much less in the past six months.
The 67 million who are still there are into having a good time. They’re more likely to have joined MySpace for fun and more likely to be interested in entertaining friends, humor and comedy, and video games. They’re less into exercise than any other social group but seek out parenting information more than any other.
The content MySpace users put up is most often about specific hobbies, or pictures of family and friends. Their average income is the lowest, at $44,000, and they have an average of 131 connections. They’re more likely to be black (9%) or Hispanic (7%) than users of the other social sites. They are also more likely to be single (60%) and students (23%).
LinkedIn users
It’s probably no surprise these guys are all about business. We say guys because LinkedIn has the only user group with more males than females (57% to 43%). They have the highest average income, at $89,000, and are more likely to have joined the site for business or work, citing keeping in touch with business networks, job searching, business development and recruiting as top reasons.
Their interests reflect that as well. They like all kinds of news, employment information, sports and politics. They also more likely to be into the gym, spas, yoga, golf and tennis.
Excluding video-game systems, they own more electronic gadgets than the other social networkers, including digital cameras, high-definition TVs, DVRs and Blu-ray players.
How do they unwind? Here were two surprises among the things they’re more interested in than the others: gambling and soap operas. Some 12% seek gambling information online (vs. an average of 7%), while 10% go online for soap-opera content (vs. an average of 5%).
Read more at: http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=137792
Source: Adage.com : http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=137792
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