A study from Anderson Analytics is due to be released Monday that may surprise you with what your social network of choice may say about you as a person.

With an estimated 110 million people in the United States using at least one social network, it’s not surprising that marketers want to discover what those users are interested in.  Anderson Analytics looked into this and surveyed users of Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter to see what it is that makes each of these groups click.

In an exclusive preview of the study to AdAge, some of the results weren’t too surprising, as in MySpace users tend to skew younger, but others were fairly enlightening.  For instance, would you have suspected that LinkedIn users are really interested in gambling and soap operas?  Well, they are.  Of those that use the professional networking site, 12% of them said they seek gambling information online compared to the average of 7% on other networks.  As for that staple of daytime entertainment known as soap operas, 10% of them said they are interested in soaps compared to the average of 5% on other networks.  (I would fall in that 10% sadly)

MySpace was interesting in that the majority said they are using the site less than they did six months ago.  There may be 67 million users still, but it makes one wonder how sustainable the site will be with its ever decreasing traffic.  The social home of all sorts of glittery graphics also tends to skew towards minorities with 9% of respondents being African American and 7% being Hispanic.

The most interesting thing about Facebook was it trends toward married people with 40% of those who took the survey saying they were indeed married.  Also, a surprising 6% of the users appear to be retired.

Twitter was the most shocking piece of information.  While there was information you suspected like that they tend to read more and enjoy online shopping, a whopping 43% said they could live without the site.  This can’t be good news for the site let alone all of the cell phone companies that are now making built-in Twitter applications a major selling point.  This may be the first sure sign that Twitter may indeed just be a fad with no staying power.

The full study is due to be released on Monday, and is definitely worth a read to see what is going on in the social media scene.

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Entry was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2009 at 3:23 pm under Advertising, Social Media.

Read more entries by Sean P. Aune.
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