Social Networking: A Tribal Affair?

Nielsen Clar­i­tas reports that peo­ple who are more afflu­ent and live in urban envi­ron­ments are more likely to use social net­works than the so-called “aver­age Amer­i­can.” They also reported dif­fer­ences in demo­graphic char­ac­ter­is­tics between Face­book users and MySpace users:

Face­book users have a largely upscale pro­file. The top third of lifestyle seg­ments rel­a­tive to afflu­ence were 25% more likely to use Face­book than those in the lower third.

Given these char­ac­ter­is­tics, it’s prob­a­bly not sur­pris­ing that these peo­ple are also more likely to use LinkedIn for busi­ness net­work­ing purposes.

On the other hand Nielsen Clar­i­tas noted that peo­ple in the bot­tom third seg­ments related to afflu­ence are 37% more likely to use MySpace for social networking.

Peo­ple who live in urban envi­ron­ments, regard­less of afflu­ence, are more likely to blog or tweet than those who live in rural areas.

Are we see­ing tribal pat­terns? Here’s another report on the same pat­terns (from CNN).

Need­less to say, adver­tis­ers are tak­ing note of these demo­graphic pat­terns, and are look­ing for ways to bet­ter tar­get their online adver­tis­ing or pro­mo­tional activities.

Non-scientific Val­i­da­tion…

I attended a brunch yes­ter­day – a good­bye party for two cou­ples who were mov­ing back to France for the win­ter rather than stay here in Seat­tle. Every­one at the brunch was over 40, all in the top third seg­ments based on afflu­ence. Almost every­one had used Face­book, to vary­ing degrees. No one men­tioned MySpace.

I was the only blog­ger, although every­one reads blogs. No one else admit­ted to using Twitter.

The big excite­ment was dis­cussing iPhone apps, such as one (name TBD) that allows you to point your iPhone cam­era at the night sky, and if your phone is GPS-enabled, it iden­ti­fies the con­stel­la­tion and nearby plan­ets. Sounds like that app is a big hit at out­door BBQ par­ties among friends.

Party Gos­sip: iPhone Adoption

Some­one remarked that 7000 peo­ple at Microsoft’s Red­mond cam­pus are iPhone cus­tomers. What’s sig­nif­i­cant about this is that these peo­ple are choos­ing to pay for the phone and the monthly AT&T wire­less plan. If they were will­ing to use a Win­dows Mobile phone, the phone and the ser­vice would be pro­vided to them at no charge by their employer.

That’s called vot­ing with your wallet.

Tagged as: social networking adoption