Anderson Analytics:Social Networks users and their preferences

Anderson Analytics surveyed 11000 people about their social networking preferences in US and have come up with the following insights for the most common social networks. Source (RWW)

Facebook

Facebookers are older and better off. They are more likely to be married (40%), white (80%) and retired (6%) than users of the other social networks. They have the second-highest average income ($61,000) and an average of 121 connections.In general, there is no one area of interest for this group of social networkers. Out of 45 categories, national news, sports, exercise, travel, and home and garden skewed only slightly higher than the rest. This is likely because this network has the most users and contains a high number of users within each demographic.Facebookers are also extremely loyal: 75% say Facebook is their favorite site and 59% say they've increased their use in the past 6 months.

Twitter

Twitter users are more likely to be employed part-time (16% vs. 11% average) and have an average income of $58,000. The average Twitter user has 28 followers and follows 32 others.The Twitter group is especially interested in news, restaurants, sports, politics, personal finance, and religion. They're also really into pop culture with music, movies, TV and reading ranking higher than average. Their buying habits reflect those interests, with this group being more likely to buy books, movies, shoes, and cosmetics.However, this group is not that loyal to the network: 43% said they could live without Twitter.

LinkedIn

It should come as no surprise that a network of business users is the one that has the highest average income ($89,000). Also not surprising is that LinkedIn users joined the network for business or work purposes, specifically for keeping in touch with business networks, job searching, business development, and recruiting.They tend to like news, employment information, sports, and politics. They're also more likely to be into the gym, spas, yoga, golf and tennis. Interestingly enough - and perhaps because they can afford to do so - LinkedIn users own more electronic gadgets than users of any of the other social networkers. In particular, they enjoy digital cameras, high-definition TVs, DVRs and Blu-ray players.However, when these guys unwind, they have some interesting interests: gambling and soap operas. 12% seek gambling information online (vs. an average of 7%), while 10% go online for soap-opera content (vs. an average of 5%).This group is more likely to be male - it's ratio of male to female users is 57% to 43%.

Conclusions:
Again a study in U.S Context but we can definately draw out some broad conclusions as to the fact that facebook is a mixed but yet a slightly premium crowd and can be used to advertise a large variety of products, linkedin as expected is for professionals and is best for advertising gadgets like the new N97 which is heavily promoted there while twitter can be used for promoting ideas and discussing popular culture oriented products