What is the age distribution in the social media sphere?
A full 25% of the users on these sites are aged 35 to 44, which in other words is the age group that dominates the social media sphere. Only 3% are aged 65 or older.
That was the age distribution when looking at these 19 social media sites together. When looking at individual social network sites, the differences are significant.
Here is the age distribution for each of the 19 social network sites. The list has been sorted by the average user age per site (see further down for that), with the “youngest” site showing at the top and the “oldest” at the bottom.
Some observations on age distribution:
- Bebo appeals to a much younger audience than the other sites with 44% of its users being aged 17 or less. For MySpace, this number is also large; 33%.
- Classmates.com has the largest share of users being aged 65 or more, 8%, and 78% are 35 or older.
- 64% of Twitter’s users are aged 35 or older.
- 61% of Facebooks’s users are aged 35 or older.
Most of the social networks we included are dominated by the age group 35-44, which was apparent in the first chart in this article. This group has become the most “social” age group out there. This is the generation of people who were in their 20s as the Web took off in the mid ‘90s.
If we look at which age groups are the largest for each site, we will have this distribution:
- 0 – 17: Tops 4 out of 19 sites (21%)
- 18 – 24: Tops no site
- 25 – 34: Tops 1 out of 19 sites (5%)
- 35 – 44: Tops 11 out of 19 sites (58%)
- 45 – 54: Tops 3 out of 19 sites (16%)
- 55 – 64: Tops no site
- 65 or older: Tops no site
It’s a bit surprising that not one single site had the age group 18 – 24 as its largest, but that can be explained by this interval being a bit smaller than the other ones (it spans seven years, not 10 as most of the others). That the two oldest age groups don’t top any of the sites probably doesn’t surprise anyone, though.
Here is an estimate of the average age for each of the social network sites included in this article:
Facts:
- The average social network user is 37 years old.
- LinkedIn, with its business focus, has a predictably high average user age; 44.
- The average Twitter user is 39 years old.
- The average Facebook user is 38 years old.
- The average MySpace user is 31 years old.
- Bebo has by far the youngest users, as witnessed earlier, with an average age of 28.
Although we can’t assure how this will change over time, at the moment the older generations are for one reason or another (tech savvy, interest, etc.) not using social networking sites to a large extent. This probably reflects general internet usage, but we suspect the difference is enhanced when it comes to the social media sphere where site usage tends to be more frequent and time-consuming than usual.
It is also noteworthy that social media isn’t dominated by the youngest, often most tech-savvy generations, but rather by what has to be referred to as middle-aged people (although at the younger end of that spectrum).