More Adults Logging On To Social Networking Sites
A report released on Wednesday showed that more people are embracing social networks like MySpace and Facebook, and the number of adults with an online profile has quadrupled in the past three years.
However, use of these friend-gathering sites remains a much bigger phenomenon among the young, as only 35 percent of the roughly three-quarters of U.S. adults who go online use social networking sites.
Just 8 percent of adult Web users were on social networking sites four years ago.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project determined just how much more likely it was for younger people to be participating in social networks. Some 65 percent of online teenagers 12 to 17 use the sites, and three-quarters of Internet users between 18 and 24 have a profile. In comparison, just 7 percent of Internet users who are 65 and older are on the sites.
One particularly surprising finding was that some 17 percent of adults have multiple profiles on one site and 4 percent have profiles for "different parts of their personality."
Pew senior research specialist Amanda Lenhart noted that these accounts often emphasize different parts of someone’s life, such as sports or hobbies. Someone might have a football-focused profile and a separate one indulging his interest in gardening.
While both men and women used the sites in equal proportions, differences were evident when it came to race.
Some 31 percent of white Web users said they have a profile on at least one social network site, compared with 43 percent of black and 48 percent of Hispanic adults.
“The difference can be attributed to the respondents’ ages, as younger segments of the population are much more diverse," said Lenhart.
Similarly, because young people tend to make less money, the survey also found that respondents with lower household incomes were more likely to use social network sites than their richer counterparts.
MySpace and Facebook users median age was 26 and 27 years old, respectively. At the career-focused LinkedIn, it was 40.
Among those adults surveyed, 38 percent said they visit their profile daily while 23 percent said they visit every few days, 15 percent once a week and 23 percent less often than once a week.
Forty-eight percent of teens visit a social network profile at least once a day, 32 percent visit weekly and 20 percent visit less often.
Other adult users have profiles on sites such as BlackPlanet, Orkut, Hi5 and Match.com, Pew said.
An increasing number of companies have a presence on social networking sites, yet socializing are people’s main reason for logging on. Among those adults surveyed, 89 percent said they use their online profiles to stay in touch with friends. Only 28 percent said they use it to make business or professional contacts and promote themselves at work.
However, only 20 percent of grown-ups listed “˜flirting’ as a primary reason to log on.
People over 30 were the fastest growing demographic for social networking site Facebook, which has about 150 million active users, mostly outside the U.S.
MySpace boasts 125 million active users, with 76 million of them in the U.S. and the grown-up demographic its biggest growth area in December.
The margin of error for the Pew survey ranged between 2.4 to 6 percentage points.
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