Are You Talking to Me? Understanding Social Media Demographics

Deciding your audience is an important part of any social media profile or campaign, but knowing your audience comes long before that. Knowing your audience is the only way to answer those burning questions you have as a small business owner: Where do I start? What social media sites do I need? Do I really need a Facebook page AND a Twitter account? What is Twitter anyway?

Small business owners tend to have a small business budget and social media marketing is hardly ever the most important item on the list. However, social media marketing can do so much more for building your brand and building trust within your industry or community. In some ways, social media is the only way you can accurately lay that foundation that helps your business compete in a digital world.

That’s why this report from Business Insider can be so helpful to determining where your audience exists on the web.

On June 3, 2015, Business Insider released The Social Demographics Report: A breakdown of who’s on each of the different social networks. That report looks like this:

Source: comScore

Business Insider’s article goes over some key takeaways from the report, but we’d like to add to that with our own list of takeaways:

• Instagram has become the most approachable social media network.
• Instagram is now capitalizing on the profile optimization allowing accounts to run Instagram ads.
• No surprise to anyone, Pinterest has a primary demographic of women.
• If you’re looking to capture the attention of the young and upcoming generation of Internet users, get creative with Snapchat, Vine, and Tumblr.
• LinkedIn is great for B2B, which is also no big surprise. One area that is often overlooked with LinkedIn is education and high-level professional marketing. LinkedIn has the most highly educated and high-income users consisting of 44% Americans with an average income of $75,000 or greater.
• Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest most particularly are not aging well. They aren’t holding on to their users or engagement. They aren’t capturing the younger generation and their attempts to do so are failing.
• Twitter has stood the test of the time better than other older social networks.
• For how recent Pinterest experienced their massive growth, they just as quickly experienced complete indifference from their once excited users.
• Facebook seems to be the way everyone stays in touch, but the social network fewer and fewer people actually use. The anticipation of how they will maintain popularity or what brilliant idea may replace Facebook keeps us all on the edge of our virtual seats.

As you research more about each social media network, not only should you take into consideration who uses the network—male, female, older, younger—you should consider how information is delivered across each of those networks.

Facebook, Google+, and Twitter have nearly the same demographic numbers according to this graph, but they are entirely different social media networks.

Facebook has a sense of consistency, but a problem of actually getting your content seen.

Twitter is a mayhem of hundreds of posts per second, yet they are becoming increasingly visual and you can practically do no wrong. With Twitter, you can post 10-15 times a day and only be seen once by a follower.

Google+ has a more technical and international demographic. Google+ readers tend to connect to Google+ at the same time of day that they connect to their personal email accounts—briefly in the morning and most certainly at night.

While each of these networks appear to be practically the same, they all have their perks and deliver information very differently. Just the same, many users exist across all three of these popular networks, but almost everyone has just one favorite. It is important to speak to your demographic across each of these channels to reach them in their time, in their way, and the way they expect to hear from you.