Here's a nice graphic on social media demographics
We yack a lot in the online space about social media as tools for our marketing, but we hardly ever address the demographics. And often in mainstream media, the assumed demographics of social media is young. Really, really young.
Take this quote, lifted from Stuart Elliot’s recent NY Times column about MTV’s new programming line up being announced at their upfront presentation, from Matt Diamond, chief executive at Alloy Media and Marketing, “’What used to be the rush to the school cafeteria to tell everyone what’s going on has become the rush to text, Facebook and Twitter. It’s the world they live in and, frankly, we live in their world.”
Perhaps 10 years ago, when MySpace was king. Increasingly the social media space is reserved for grown ups. In fact, according to this study released last year from Pingdom, a web monitoring provider, the demographics skew firmly in favor of the 35 plus set.
Clearly that changes by site, but its worth noting that over 60% of Twitter and Facebook users are 35 and older. Twitter and Facebook appear to be the primary avenues of social media marketing outreach.