I came across some really interesting data from Sysomos, about how social media is a world wide phenomena. A lot of times we get caught up talking about the latest and greatest social networking site or social media tactic that we fail to take a step back and look at who is talking about social media, where are they talking and what industries are the in?
Hopefully this research data was answer some of those questions.
Who:
What is really surprisingly in looking at the Sysomos data is that social media is not the domain of the young. It is the 35-50 year age group that was talking about it the most with 41.3% of the conversation. The 21-35 year old crowd (which I thought would have dominated ) held 37.9% of the conversation. The under 20 crowd may be big users of social media, but they speak the least about it with only 6.8% of the conversation.
Where:
Now that we know who is talking about social media, the next question is where are they talking about it. And by where I don’t mean what social media network. I mean as in physical location. As this world map shows, in 2010 social media was a hot topic world wide with concentrated regions of talk coming from major world cities, but not just major cities.
By drilling down even further into the data, we are able to see what countries were talking about social media the most. No surprise that the majority of the talk was coming from the US with 45.3% of the conversation. Coming in a distant second was the UK with 11.4% of the conversation and followed by Canada (4.8%) and India (4.5%).
What Industries
In looking at which industries were talking the most about social media it came as no surprise to find the technology, communications and marketing fields in the top three. The tech industry and communications field talked the most both holding 12.6% of the conversation, while the marketing industry followed with 9.5%. What I found most interesting is the breadth of industries talking about social media. In the Arts (7.5%), Education (7.5%) and Publishing (6%), social media is a very hot topic. It is not a topic that is limited to tech or marketing.
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Thanks for sharing some of our data with your readers!
Cheers,
Sheldon, community manager for Sysomos
This isn’t surprising, but it disappoints me to see that “manufacturing” doesn’t have a teeny tiny piece of the pie chart representing the industries talking about social media. I suppose they fall into “other.” As with most new marketing technology, the industrial sector is a little slow to catch on.
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