Old People on SN sites, Youth Still Dominate

New Pew study is out about social networking sites. This time it looks at the connectivity to SN's by age specifically examining the ways in which older folks are using SN's.

Pew writes, young people are much more likely than older adults to use social networks, shocker... But these numbers will of course evolve as Millennials grow older and seniors move along...

"Overall, personal use of social networks seems to be more prevalent than professional use of networks, both in the orientation of the networks that adults choose to use as well as the reasons they give for using the applications. Most adults, like teens, are using online social networks to connect with people they already know.

When users do use social networks for professional and personal reasons, they will often maintain multiple profiles, generally on different sites.

Most, but not all adult social network users are privacy conscious; 60% of adult social network users restrict access to their profiles so that only their friends can see it, and 58% of adult social network users restrict access to certain content within their profile. "

No word yet on if there is an iPhone app for that....

As a friend noted the people who were still in college when Facebook was invented are in the 18-24 pile right now for the most part, but will pretty quickly be making the jump to the next age group, where they’ll linger for ten years.

• 75% of online adults 18-24 have a profile
• 57% of online adults 25-34 have a profile
• 30% of online adults 35-44 have a profile
• 19% of online 45 to 54 year olds have a profile
• 10% of online 55 to 64 year olds have a profile
• 7% of online adults 65 and older have a profile

Networks adults are using:

• 50% of adult social network users have a profile on MySpace
• 22% have a profile on Facebook
• 6% have a profile on LinkedIn

They also saw that social networks are evenly spread among women and men but a friend also noted that she saw in another report that women are more likely to share content on social networks than men, whereas men were more likely than women to share content on blogs.

I'm still making my way through Danah Boyd's final doctoral thesis that according to the abstract

"documents [her] 2.5-year ethnographic study of American teens’ engagement with social network sites and the ways in which their participation supported and complicated three practices—self-presentation, peer sociality, and negotiating adult society."

I'm making lots of notes for a future post that can condense it into a blog (is there an iPhone app for that?), but I highly recommend reading the full dissertation which you can find at her website www.danah.org.