Is Anybody Out There?

Lately I have found myself wondering more and more who is actually using all these social media sites. Most of marketing comes down to matching a target market with an audience of the desired demographic. To better market these sites, I looked at all the demographic data I have gathered from the accounts that I manage and the results were very skewed. This is most likely because the purposes of all the accounts I manage are very different, so the accounts viewership is quite different. This data alone is not a great representation of who’s actually on these sites. So some 3^rd party survey data would need to be looked at to put together a better picture.

After looking at a few studies, I found several that all had similar information so the data was more than likely somewhat accurate. The data that I looked at online confirmed a few interesting theories of my own. These theories included, far more women use social media then men and that large amounts of people below the poverty line use social media. Also, this data confirmed some more obvious facts like far more people use Facebook than any other social media site and more people use twitter than Pinterest.

Looking at all this different data revealed some interesting information. However most social media users consider this information to be common knowledge. The aspect of social media that needs to be looked at in greater depth is engagement rates. On what sites are people really posting and communicating? Facebook has the most market share but I feel user involvement on the site is way down. Google plus posts huge numbers of new users in the last 2 years but that is just because Google made every Gmail account a Google plus user account. Most of those people have never used Google plus and don’t intend to start using it.

The conclusion that I have come to is that there is a lot of “information” out on the web about who’s on social media but most of it needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The best way to position a company’s social media is based mostly on the content the company intends to share and where sharing that information would be most relevant. Picking a business’s social media platforms based on their target market and matching that target with the demographics of a specific social network is a poor choice. There are too many other variables that come into play. A combination of trial and error and past experiences on the social sites is the best way to pick a social network for a business.