Monday, 29 August 2011
Social Media is not ubiquitous. In fact, says a Pew Internet survey released on Friday, just half of U.S. adults are logged on to sites like MySpace, Facebook , Twitter or LinkedIn.
It's easy for the quick growth of social media use to give the impression that everybody uses it enthusiastically. In a similar study that Pew conducted in 2008, just 29% of all Internet users said that they used social media its adoption has more than doubled in three years.
But email is still the most popular online activity among Internet users, with 61% of survey respondents using it every day. Search engines are the second-most popular activity, with 59% of respondents using them daily. Less than half, just 43%, of Internet users said that they used social media daily.
Growth of social media is largely fueled by seniors, who still aren't nearly as likely as younger age groups to use it every day. In the past two years, social networking use among Internet users age 65 and older has increased 150% while social media use among Internet users under age 30 has remained about stable (according to Pew, 83% of them use social networks).
The 30- to 49-year-old crowd has been quickly closing the social media usage gap between themselves and the under 30 demographic. In 2008, 42% fewer respondents in the older demographic used social media than the younger demographic. Now the gap between the two age groups is 13%. So too, has the gap between the percentage of the two age groups who use social media daily decreased, from 29% in 2008 to 15% in 2011.
