August 2008

I recently participated in writing a research brief on marketing opportunities on social network sites (social network sites such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.).  Part of our research was to see what information we could find regarding popularity of social network sites worldwide as well as member population makeup, specifically social network population by age and gender.  The research data I needed went far beyond my high-level post on social networks in February.

Happily, we were able to find data that helped in our analysis without spending a dime.

Global popularity of social network sites

In research social networking site popularity, we came across a great blog post: “Modeling The Real Value of Social Networks“.  The post by Michael Arrington (that appeared on his site TechCrunch) was focused on assigning a valuation social network sites.  While I wasn’t interested in the valuation, the post leveraged data that was just what we were looking for to get a gauge on overall popularity: April 2008 comScore social network site data for their supported countries and regions.

Interested? TechCrunch made the data available as a Google Docs spreadsheet:

• TechCrunch – The True Value of Social Networks

Member population: age and gender

Another key piece of data we were trying to find was a breakdown of social network site members by age and gender.  I was fairly confident that this data would be hard to come by, but some persistent Google searches turned up this gem: Two Rapleaf studies focused on that exact topic.  The studies are biased towards the U.S. market, but the information is compelling and valuable nonetheless.  Rapleaf’s commentary on how males and females differ in their usage of the social network sites is also interesting.  Following links from these press releases will get you to data (some of it is provided right in the press releases also):

• Rapleaf Study of Social Network Users vs. Age
• Rapleaf Study Reveals Gender and Age Data of Social Network Users

I hope this data helps in your social network research!

{ 3 comments }