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Do you know how old the average Twitter or Facebook user is? Do you know what share of Reddit’s users are women? We could go on and on; when it comes to social network demographics, the questions are endless. This article is going to answer those questions for you, showing you the age and gender distribution on 24 of today’s most popular social networks and online communities.
Facebook is still growing and is getting close to enrolling that magic 1 billionth user. According to data we gathered from Socialbakers, Facebook has added 180 million new users in the past year. But where are those users coming from?
In this article we’ll look into just that. The population of Facebook is changing, growing in new places. For example, it turns out that in the past year, 30% of all new Facebook users have come from just two countries.
Facebook has become a huge presence on the Web. A full 24.3% of the top 10,000 websites in the world have some form of official Facebook integration on their homepage. And if you include regular links to Facebook, the number soars up to a highly impressive 49.3%.
Now after Facebook has had its much talked-about IPO, it’s worth noting how close the social network is to becoming part of the Web’s DNA. When so many websites have some form of Facebook integration, maybe we’re already there.
Once users start abandoning a social network, like migrating birds, they leave in droves. Unlike birds, however, they don’t come back.
Case in point, the MySpace traffic graph at the top. In just three years, the former social network giant has gone from having north of 20 million daily visitors to around 2 million. In other words, the MySpace website has lost more than 90% of its visitors in that time.
To further illustrate this phenomenon, here are the traffic changes for three other formerly popular social networks from yesteryear.
George Orwell’s arguably most famous novel, the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, coined a number of phrases that are in widespread use today. One of them was “Big Brother,” an authority figure who watches every move you make, everywhere. The term has become synonymous with mass surveillance. As you can imagine, the book is easily as relevant today as it was back in 1949 when it was first published. (It’s a great read, btw.)
The usual complaints about modern-era Big Brothers – aside from that annoying reality show – tend to be targeted at initiatives to place more surveillance cameras in various locations (e.g. the camera-riddled London). Then of course there is the monitoring of our activities on the Internet by governments, ISPs and organizations with their own agendas.
As you may have heard, Facebook very recently passed 900 million active users. We think it’s pretty safe to say that it’s by far the largest social network in history.
That number, 900 million, is hard to get your head around. It’s such a huge number. We thought it would be fun to illustrate it with a neat little infographic. Enjoy!
Tumblr has almost doubled in size since last fall. Back in September 2011, the blogging service hosted 28 million blogs containing a total of 10 billion blog posts. Today, Tumblr has passed 50 million blogs, and its users have produced more than 20 billion blog posts.
Twitter is growing and evolving, and the service clearly wants plenty of new users to join its folds. However, try registering a new Twitter account, and come up with a username that isn’t already registered. You’ll soon find that there’s some serious username depletion going on.
Things wouldn’t be so bad if the person who had already taken your brilliantly though-out nickname was actually using that Twitter account. But take a look around and you’ll find lots of examples of users who clearly have just created a Twitter account, signed in once or twice, and then never used the service again. And since Twitter accounts never expire, that username is now gone for all time.
And it’s not a small problem. Twitter could have more than 100 million unused accounts. In January, Twitter reported that it had almost 200 million registered users, a number that has surely grown significantly since then. In September, Twitter reported that it had 100 million active users (users who sign in at least once a month). Quite a difference.
And now for something short and sweet, or bittersweet if you worked at MySpace back in 2006-2007 when the social network was still going strong.
To say that Facebook stole MySpace’s thunder in those years is probably the understatement of the decade. By the end of 2008, the social media focus (and mindshare) had already shifted away from MySpace to Facebook in a massive fashion. A picture is worth a thousand words, or in this case, a chart.
Online social networks are everywhere these days, a truly global phenomenon. But where are the different social networks having the most success in terms of popularity? That is what we’ll try to answer in this post.
We have included 11 social networks in this survey: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Orkut, Tumblr, FourSquare, MySpace, LiveJournal, Hi5 and Bebo.
