In the last lesson we established that social media platforms are not a cheap and easy way to get links to your site. In this lesson, I'll walk through many of the most important social media platforms, and tell you a bit about the demographics of each one. This information should help you evaluate which platforms make the most sense for your business. First, let's start with Facebook. It's the largest. It is 1.4 billion users. And here's some of the basic data here. And so you understand the chart here, it's specific to U.S. users and you can see a link, by the way, to the original source at the bottom of the chart. But 66% of the men in the United States are on Facebook, and 77% of women. And that's the way to interpret this part of the chart. And now you can do the same thing for the age demographics. You can see for 18 to 29, it's a huge percentage of the users. Sorry, the people in that part of the population that are users of Facebook. And so forth for each of the categories, 30 to 49, and so forth. You can see, by the way, even at 65 plus, we have more than 55% of the people in that age range on Facebook here in the U.S. Now, for education, you can see the college graduates, 74% of them, 71% of those who had some college, and only 70%. That's actually not a major difference. So, education doesn't seem to be a major differentiator in terms of percentage of participation on Facebook. Likewise for location. Not a huge amount of variance there either. So from urban to suburban to rural makes little difference. Income brackets. Maybe a little bit of a difference there. Again, not a wide range. What's the lesson of this? Facebook is prevalent through all aspects of U.S. society. So, let's take another look at it. Let's break it out and show the split of where Facebook users are between men and women by age range. So just so you understand how this chart reads. So, for men, 36% of all the male users on Facebook in the U.S. are between 18 and 24. Okay? And correspondingly, 33% of the women are in that same age range. Whereas by the time you get down to 65, it's a smaller, smaller percentage. So it gets kind of weighted towards the young side of things, as you can see. Now, if we take a more international view, and we look at Facebook's total audience, and what are the largest countries in terms of contributing people to the overall Facebook audience. Well, 14% of all the users on Facebook are from U.S., United States of America. And so forth, you can see down the line with France contributing 2%, Thailand 2%, and so forth. So this gives you some idea of where Facebook users come from. But the reality is Facebook is a broad international phenomenon, and it's really well represented all across the globe. So now, let's look at Twitter. It has 320 million users overall. And if we look at the statistics that I'm showing here for U.S. users once again, 24% of the men in the U.S. are on Twitter, and 21% of the women. Likewise, you can see the age breakouts as you did last time. Also skews younger, but actually a little bit more dramatically than Facebook did. And similarly, with the education where the college graduate group tends to be more active on Twitter than in the earlier ranges. You remember on Facebook these lines were closer to each other in scope. Similarly, we see a but more impact from your location, where urban tends to be significantly more higher then rural, say, than the same difference that we saw on Facebook. From an income perspective, likewise, well, actually here it's not much difference. Little bit of skew between the two top income brackets and the two lower income brackets. Now let's take a look at Instagram, which is also actually owned by Facebook. And this has 400 million users, and it's actually larger than Twitter. So here we see that 22% of the men in the U.S. are on Instagram, and 29% of the women. So that skews a bit towards the female side of things. Age-wise, more dramatic tendency for the younger people, the younger audience, to be on that than the older one. So Instagram is different than it's parent property, Facebook. And similar to Twitter, you get a skewing towards higher levels of education, 24%, 31% of the people with college and graduated from college. From a location perspective, urban is a bit stronger here, but not much different from suburban, and a little bit stronger than the rural side. On the income side of things, not so much difference from end to end in this set of stats here. So now let's take a look at LinkedIn, 347 million users in the U.S., 28% of men are on LinkedIn, 27% of women. The age range. You see how even those bars are, not a lot of difference there. From an education perspective, 50% of people with college graduation are on LinkedIn. That's in the U.S. Pretty interesting stat. Much small percentage for the some college and high school people. Also, the urban and suburban, much stronger than the rural for LinkedIn. And that's because of the professional connections nature of LinkedIn. And likewise, you can see that higher income is a big factor. Just to take another look at LinkedIn, here is LinkedIn's own data, it's published on LinkedIn itself, as to where LinkedIn users come from. So, a very strong percentage of people from North America. A pretty strong representation from several other parts across the globe. So now, let's take a look at Pinterest. 100 million users on Pinterest, smaller audience, but look at the gender gap here. 27% of women in the U.S. are on Pinterest and only 13% of men. That's a 2:1 ratio. That's pretty important. Age doesn't seem to make a lot of difference, except that 65 plus kind of falls off a little bit. And some level of college education seems to matter here, for a level of Pinterest, as people who are high school or less are significantly less than those that have some or have actually graduated from college. Now here's an interesting thing. From a location perspective, the rural segment of the population is actually the strongest participation in Pinterest. Although, it's kind of close to suburban, and not really that much more than urban. But unlike some of the other platforms we've looked at, this is actually a stronger way to get into that rural segment of the audience. Income-wise, not much difference between the very high income and the moderately high income brackets there, at 34 and 30%. But it definitely does slope down as income drops. We don't have the same kind of data for Google+. And in fact, it's much harder to get data because it's been a very long time since Google shared any stats itself. And the last data they shared was really dependent on counting everybody who had any Google profile, since anyone with any Google profile was effectively a Google+ user according to the early definition. So at Stone Temple Consulting we did our own study to try to come up with an estimate of how many users that Google+ had. Our estimate at that time was 50 million users. I gotta emphasize that it was a pretty significant extrapolation, and the accuracy of that is not that great. But I can tell you that I'm fairly confident that its not at the same level of usage of the other platforms that we've discussed so far. And looking at the gender gap here, its pretty strong. It skews very heavily towards men. 74% of the users on Google+ are men, 26% women. And you can see that it also skews towards the U.S., with a very large percentage of the users being from the U.S. But a very strong contingent from India, and Brazil, UK, and Canada correspondingly as well. Snapchat. Let's take a look at this. 200 million users. Again, not a ton of data available on this, but 70% of the users are women on Snapchat. So another one of those networks that skews towards women. Definitely skews towards the younger side much more than some of the other networks we looked at. And actually towards lower income more than some of the networks that we've looked at so far. That was a lot of information to absorb. But hopefully you can get some sense from it which social media platforms might make the most sense for you. Because you should try to go where your audience goes. If you're more interested in a platform that has a preponderance of women on it, then that will guide you towards certain platforms. If it's more about income or rural, again, each of these things can help you understand where you should be. Now that you have all that information, I'll use the next lesson to provide you with some more guidelines for figuring out which social media platforms you want to include in your strategy.
