UNDERSTANDING THE AUDIENCES OF MAJOR SOCIAL MEDIA

PLATFORMS

This lecture is all about understanding the audiences of major social media
platforms. You may be wondering why is it that we would want to know this
information. Well, this information is very, very important for you as an
individual with a website, or a business, and that’s because you want to be on
the social media networks, or the social media platforms that your audience is
on.
If you’re not on those platforms at all you’re really missing out, and you’re not
able to connect with them. Today’s lecture is all about:
 Understanding those audiences
 Understanding the demographics of the people that are on these different
platforms.
 Getting a better idea of which ones you should use in order to better
connect with your audience overall.
This lecture is going to be a little bit more academic in nature compared to
what I usually do, and what I mean by that is, I went out onto the internet, and
I did some research to try to find a very reputable source that did a research
study where we could really have data here that I could present that was very
beneficial, very accurate, and was done in a way that was through a research
study so that we’d know that we could trust what it is that we’re reading.
There’s a lot of blog posts out there where someone just says, “I believe that
this particular platform is great for this, and this particular platform is great
for this. That’s usually, I mean for the most part true for what they’re saying,
but that’s all anecdotal, there’s no actual data to support what they’re saying.
The purpose of what I did here is to find the research study with the data that
actually validates this.
Now, that being said, what I was able to do is after researching, I found a
research study that was done by the PEW Research Center, which is over at
pewinternet.org, and the data that we have here, a little bit about the study
itself so that you understand where we’re coming from.

UNDERSTANDING THOSE AUDIENCES

First off, it was a survey that was done by phone, okay, so it was a telephone
survey, and it reached out to Americans, so this is only the American market, it
reached out to people that were 18 years or older, so anybody that’s younger
than that is not included here, which is important, but if you’re trying to get
that adult audience which most websites or businesses are, this is helpful
information, and the way it was done was that Princeton Survey Research
Associates International, they reached out in August to September of 2013,
and what they did is they were able to contact 1,801 adults that again, were
age 18 years and older, and what was done is they asked them if they would be
willing to take a survey, and then they asked them a series of questions.
The results that I’m about to present to you are from that survey, and with this
being said some people will say, “Well, this is from 2013 is it still accurate?”
Everything that I know in my industry knowledge, I feel that this may not be,
numbers may not be the exact same as they are today, but the overall trends
and what’s being seen in this survey, I’m sure ring true today as well.
Let’s start off by talking about this little graph here, which is the social media
sites of 2012 and 2013, and what this represents is the percent of online
adults who use the following social media websites by year. As you can see, not
surprisingly, Facebook is the largest social network that’s out there.
I think one thing that will be surprising to a lot of people that LinkedIn, which
is primarily just a professional social network, that is actually the highest, and
again this is from adults that are eighteen and older, but that’s actually the
highest amount here, which I think which had surprised some, and as you can
see, the other thing that we can really take away from this graph overall is that
social media usage, at least in 2013, has continued to grow, and like I said, I
don’t have the 2014 data as well, but if we did I’d be willing to bet that 2014
grew as well.

Understanding the demographics of the people that are on

these different platforms.
Next, we have a part of the study that’s really focused on Facebook users, and
you can tell, for the most part this data, I don’t think is necessarily that
surprising, a lot of this is really what I would expect anyway when I would be
looking at Facebook Data but, two things that are definitely important that
should be brought out here is that overall, 71% of the users who were
surveyed, so just almost three quarters of the people that were surveyed, they
do use Facebook on a consistent basis.
In addition to that, 45% of the internet users that are age 65 or older are now
using Facebook, so 45%, and that’s actually up if you look at 2012 data, that’s
up from 35% previously, in other words, those that are 65 and older are
beginning to use Facebook more and more often, so it shows that that
particular graphic for that age range definitely they’re using Facebook a lot
more than they used to and it’s one of the growing segments within Facebook.
One thing that I know, and this is anecdotal just on news that I’ve read is that
with Snapchat, if you’ve heard of that, Snapchat is a mobile person to person
messaging system where you can send some texts, you can send images to
each other, that is actually taking away the teenagers from Facebook
Again, it’s important to realize that this data is only people that are 18 and
older, but if it were to go younger than 18, it’s likely that there was a bit of a
decline in that particular area.

Now we move on to the next graph here, which is Twitter users so, among
online adults, the percentage who use Twitter, and this overall, so, overall of
other people that were surveyed, 18% of them are using Twitter, and of those
18%, breaking that down a little bit further, interestingly enough, 29% of them
were black, non-Hispanic, which is interesting because that means the African-
American younger adults are using this, and we can say younger adults
because as you can see in the age ranges, this particular social network is
really over-represented in the ages of 18-29, and 30-49’s a pretty wide range, I
would have liked to have seen that broken down a little bit further with age,
but basically those that are 49 and under is really where most of Twitter usage
resides.
Next we’re going to talk about one that maybe all of you aren’t on, but that is
Instagram, and Instagram really is the focus of, it’s a photo sharing service
where you can have a social network part of it intertwined so that other people
can see your photos and comment on them, and that sort of thing. Instagram,
it was acquired by Facebook in April of 2012, and with that being said, 17% of
the individuals who were surveyed are currently using Instagram, or were so in
2013, and that was up from 13%.
So it grew about 4% year over year, and two particular groups that you may
notice are represented here is first off that the ages of 18-29 has increased
from 28% in 2012, to 37% in 2013. In other words, the age range of 18-29
began to use Instagram a lot more than the year prior, and also, similar to
Twitter, the black community, or African-American community, they also have
begun to use this a lot more. In 2012 they were at 23%, and in 2013 they
ended up being at 34%.
Next, we are going to talk about Pinterest. Now, Pinterest in itself, again, it’s
one of those social networks where basically you can make boards, and what
you’re able to do is you’re able to put pictures onto those boards. For instance,
if you wanted a dream wedding and you said, “I want to collect all of my dream
wedding items, or things that I want to be in my dream wedding”, then you
would be able to create a board for that, and put all those items onto the dream
wedding board.
Now, Pinterest in itself, overall 21% of the users who were asked if they were on
Pinterest said, “Yes.” That was up from 15% who did the same in 2012. Women
in the U.S. really dominate Pinterest, you can see that they’re definitely over-
represented, there is 33% of the people who replied that are on Pinterest
actively said, “Yes, I’m female” verses male at 8%.

So, it’s mostly a female social network, and also something that’s really
interesting about Pinterest is that overall, if you look at the income levels when
you compare it to other social media networks, the income levels of those that
are utilizing Pinterest tend to be a little bit on the higher end, and so does the
education level. So, I don’t know, the correlation there to me makes sense the
more schooling you get, the better off you’re going to be paid generally, but the
point is, is that this is one of those where the audience is a little more affluent
on Pinterest.
The last social media platform that we’re going to talk about is LinkedIn.
Overall, of all the people that were surveyed 22% of them utilize LinkedIn, and
as you can see, men were over-represented form women 24% to 19%, so it is a
little bit more male.
Something that’s interesting here though, it’s similar to Pinterest, as you can
the education level is really over-represented at 38%, and also the income
levels from $50,000 to $75,000 a year, or $50,000 to $75,000 or more per year
is also over-represented, and that’s not surprising because, this is a
professional network that’s really geared towards professional development,
keeping your professional connections, and that sort of thing.
One thing that’s really striking about this data that I think is really important
is that, you can see 18-29 is actually a much lower usage than 30-49, and even
more than 50-64. Those who are between the ages of 30-64 are much more
likely to use LinkedIn, which makes sense, because at that point you’re really
ingrained in your profession, and you have a better understanding of what it is
that you want to do.

Getting a better idea of which ones you should use in order

to better connect with your audience overall.
Alright, so moving right along, let’s talk about the frequency of social media
network use. Now, this is interesting, this actually shows the percent of users,
and how often they actually use each particular social media network that’s
out there.
As you can see, Facebook is the runaway favorite. 63%of the people use
Facebook on a daily basis, and I can say I’m one of those people, assumedly
most of you are as well. Next, we have Instagram, is also in terms of daily basis
used very often, then Twitter, then the daily use kinds of falls off with Pinterest
and LinkedIn, but as you can see with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, those are
kind of hovering around the same with weekly usage, and then as you can see,
Pinterest jumps up to 30% meaning that, it’s more likely that people will check
Pinterest weekly than they will daily.
Same thing with LinkedIn, it’s represented at 34%, so it jumps up quite a bit,
especially from daily, in other words most people do not check LinkedIn daily,
that’s what this says, but they check it weekly, and then from there you can
see that the bottom most bar is all about…it’s less often. I don’t know how they
define that, but LinkedIn is checked less often than all the other social
networks than Pinterest, then Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
This gives a breakdown of how often people are actually using these social
media sites. In other words, if you’re not on Facebook, get on Facebook with
your own business page. Everybody’s there, they’re using it daily, you want to
become involved, and same thing Instagram, if you’re not there, and you think
it could work, and you can have an image focused profile or company page
within Instagram, definitely create that, and even Twitter, all three of those are
definitely the big three in terms of people who are using them on a daily basis.
Now, the next part of the study talked about the number of social media sites
that are used overall, because I think a lot of people see this information, and
they think, “Well, yeah, but all these people are using different sites, so how
accurate is the information”, and the study did a great job of breaking that
down as well, and as you can see here what is has, is that it shows that 36% of
the people who were, who did the survey said that they only use one site, which
I think might be a little bit surprising to people, me personally, I’m active on
three sites, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, but a lot of people are not. This
just shows that it’s over-represented by one site, there are people who get into
two cites, some into three, four, five, etc…
Now, the last part of this study was the social media matrix, and I think this is
really, really important. This actually tells you of the percentage of people that
use social media website A, how many of those are using social media website
B? In other words, what I’m saying is when you look at this, the percent of
Twitter users who use Instagram is at 53%, in other words, those two pair very
nicely. If you look at Instagram users who use Facebook 93%, you can see
there’s a little bit of a drop off here with the percentage of LinkedIn users who
use Facebook, compared to all the others anyway, it’s only at 83%
This data does a good job in helping you understand if you’re audience…if
really active on one social media network and platform, and you’re trying to
think of what other platform should I get on to be able to interact with a similar
audience? It’s obviously not going to be guaranteed, there’s a lot of variable
here, but for the most part you can rely on this data to see what other social
media platforms it makes sense for you to be on.