Understanding audience composition, socially speaking
Net hours. Ninety percent of UK online users aged 25 to 34 visit social networking sites, spending an average of almost five and a half hours a month with social media, according to comScore metrics. Facebook was the most popular destination among all online users in the market in May, with 24 million unique visitors (compared to 15 million at the same time last year), ahead of Bebo on 12 million. MySpace had just 6.5 million UVs. Twitter boasted 2.7 million visitors.
comScore points out that social networking isn’t just the preserve of youth, however, with social media grabbing the interest of a large number of those aged 35 and older.
“Accurate demographic profiling is the crux of effective digital media planning and advertising,” said Mike Read, md of comScore Europe. “Understanding audience composition is particularly important in a category such as social networking, as there continues to be a misconception that social networking is the preserve of the young. While those under 35 years old are certainly the more prevalent users, there is both a sizeable and heavily engaged audience of those 35 and older as well. In fact, advertising on social networking sites has a better chance of reaching these older demographics than site categories such as business and finance, which is a critical insight that might be lost for those trying to optimize their campaign against target audience segments.”
