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On Oct 1, 2009, Brian Solis published "Revealing the People Defining Social Networks" on his blog, PR 2.0.These numbers, collected via Google Ad Planner, were listed without any graphical representation. We charted the data to visually highlight trends (US only). The results are illuminating and we share our interpretations below. Traffic
The first chart is Unique Visitors to a site as measured in thousands of visitors.As you can see, Facebook is the giant having greatly surpassed MySpace.Twitter, has now risen out the "also-ran" category but still falls far behind Facebook.However, I am curious how Twitter's open API and the proliferation of third-party applications affects these numbers.This would be any are worthy of further investigation. 
When we look at Total Page Views we see that the "Big 3" – Facebook, MySpace and Twitter – are all above the 10 billion mark.The rest fall below the 1 billion level.Again, it begs the question, if we could measure all the ways Twitter's data is being viewed, would that swamp even Facebook?Recently, third-party applications, e.g. Seesmic Desktop, began presenting posts from Facebook streams so these numbers are not completely indicative of total content impressions for either Facebook or Twitter.So, simple page view counts will be less meaningful in trying to measure the impact of a message posted to a social network. Still, in terms of an advertising outlet, Facebook is the largest platform. 
With average visits per visitor we see the "Big Three" are the tall poles holding up the social networking tent. 
Average time on the site shows an interesting shift in that MySpace takes over the top spot.As we will discuss below, we believe this may be due to the youthfulness of the audience – who we suppose has more disposable time – and the role music and video may play in engaging a viewer.Twitter, on the other hand, falls down among the rest of the networks and this seems reasonable given the ease and quickness with which units of information (e.g. posts) can be digested on its pages.Ning deserves recognition as an up-and-coming player from the field of "white slate" social networks. 
PopulationLooking at the ages of the users of these networks, we can see three notable distributions.First, we see that the bulk of the viewers cluster around the age range of 25-54 with the mode generally in the 35-44 range.This obviously negates the stereotype that social media is dominated by high school and college "kids".Second, MySpace is the one exception that skews to younger audience with a mode in the 0-17 age group, tapers off with college-aged young adults and then picks up again in the adult population.This, I believe, accurately reflects MySpace's bimodal population of adolescents and musical artists.Third, we have the LinkedIn population where the data skews to an older population focused more in the 35-54 age range.Again, this seems natural given LinkedIn's focus on business professionals and the likelihood that workers in those age groups are probably more mobile within the workforce and entering their peak earning years.  Given what we've seen so far in these charts, the Education Levels are not surprising.As with Age, we see the same three distributions in education:most social networks have some college, MySpace users have less, and LinkedIn users have more. 
It's not clear if household income reported by Solis is based on a global or US population but according to Wikipedia, Average US Household Income was $50,233.00 in 2007.Given that point of reference, the income distribution below – which indicates a mode in the range of $25,000 - $75,000 – seems to imply social networking utilization mimics income distribution in the United States.If, on the other hand, this data is based on a global population, then this will require further investigation. 
Finally, we looked at gender distribution in social networking. This data set has already generated several comments on Brian Solis' blog and on Twitter.As we can easily see, social networking sites seem to have more women than men using them.The one exception is Digg, which is a news sharing site.Some theories have been proffered as to why this is but we will reserve exploration of this phenomenon to another article at a later time. 
Conclusion
The data presented by Solis provides useful insight into the social media landscape.Besides re-enforcing the image of the Big Three, it highlights the unique qualities of MySpace and LinkedIn and clearly shows that social networking is used by educated adults with moderate to high incomes. This, we believe, affirms our belief that social networking and social media have entered into ubiquity – any mainstream, connected adult is now part of the network, which accentuates the need to manage and engage appropriately with your communities online.
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Analysis 
