Real Estate Investing and Marketing

A new social media study from Anderson Analytics just came out.. very interesting indeed.

What Your Favorite Social Network Says About You

Which social network you use says a lot about you and you might be surprised just what it says about you. The study from Anderson Analytics is helping identify users’ likely interests, buying habits, media consumption and more for marketers. They studied the demographics and psychographics of both social networkers and non-users and found that “there are definite data-driven segments in the social-networking-site market, both for non-users and users,” said Tom Anderson, founder and managing partner.

Today 110 million Americans, or 60% of the online population, use social networks, and that number is fairly conservative, because instead of counting unique users or everyone who has an account, as many estimates do, the Anderson study counted only people who have used a social network at least once in the past month.

Users tend to spend a lot of time on social networks. The average social networker goes to social sites five days a week and checks in about four times a day for a total of an hour each day. A super-connected 9% stay logged in all day and are “constantly checking out what’s new.”

Social networkers’ feelings about brands online in general are more positive than the researchers thought they would be. Some 52% of social networkers had friended or become a fan of at least one brand. When asked if seeing a brand on a social network makes them feel positive or negative about that brand, an almost-equal 17% said positive and 19% said negative. The other 64% were neutral or didn’t care. When asked if they would like more communications from brands, 45% were neutral, while 20% said yes and 35% said no.

Anderson conducted the study online in June with 5,000 demographically representative respondents, and then went in-depth with 1,250 of them. With the help of Mr. Anderson and his team, Ad Age dug into the reams of stats to create the mini profiles below.

Social-network users overall
Social networkers get a bad rap for using social media to pump up their egos and reputations with “fake” friends. But the truth is, in general, they’re not super-aggressive about building networks. Almost half (45%) said they will link only to family and friends, and another 18% will link only to people they’ve met in person. That means almost two-thirds associate only with people they know offline. The fake-frienders are still out perpetuating the myth, though — 10% of those surveyed said they will connect with anyone who’s willing to connect with them.

And another myth blown: Most users are not wasting company time. Only 15% said they go on social networks at work.

Their top three interests are music, movies and hanging out with friends, and they use social media most to stay in touch with friends, family and classmates. Not surprisingly, they do more online than non-users of social media, from watching videos to reading blogs to making purchases. They are four times more vocal than non-users when it comes to commenting on discussion boards, posting blog entries and uploading videos. Read more…