Older social media users have grown more likely to follow brands on social media sites as they’ve gained more experience interacting on them, but younger adults still outnumber them in this activity. Millennials’ enthusiasm for making friends with brands, though, may not be too far above average.

The “American Millennials” survey, conducted by Barkley in advance of September’s Share.Like.Buy conference, found that over half of millennials, defined here as consumers ages 16 to 34, liked checking out brands on social media sites. That compared with just over a third of older adults.

The survey, fielded in partnership with the Service Management Groupand sponsored by Boston Consulting Group, also found that a third of millennials like brands more if they use social media. That was nearly double the percentage of older adults who said the same. Still, over 30% of millennials thought it was annoying for brands to be on sites like Facebook and Twitter—making this group less tolerant of social media marketing than those 35 to 74.

The Barkley survey did find that millennials were more likely than older adults to “like” a brand on Facebook, and did so more often. And interaction rates were somewhat higher as well.

Nearly one in four millennials (23.5%) interacted with content from a brand’s Facebook page at least once a daily, vs. 17% of older adults who did the same. Millennials were also 4.4 percentage points more likely to interact with brand content between one and six times per week. While similar shares of both age groups interacted at lower frequencies, overall older adults were nearly twice as likely never to engage with brand content on Facebook.

Brands have the opportunity not only to attract younger adults as fans of their brand, but also to interact with them frequently once they do. The fact that many millennials sign on to Facebook almost every day, and a substantial percentage are willing to engage with brands that often, means that a stream of updated and valuable content has the potential to attract their attention over and over—as long as it doesn’t annoy them.

Coyle Media has created a great info-graphic providing insight into the demographics, behaviors and affinity of fans that follow NHL teams on Twitter. Take a look…

[Via Coyle Media]

Some of the items that I found to be most interesting were:

• 78% attended at least one game, which is particularly impressive since only 68% live within the team’s metro area.
• 87% check Twitter multiple times a day, but only about 1/3 of these users have used a geolocation service. While geolocation has a lot of potential, the adoption rate is still much slower than other forms of social media usage.
• The fact that 88% are multi-screeners shows how much value fans see in social engagement as a key facet to the home viewing experience. The more that media outlets integrate social media, the better experience these viewers will have.

Sports teams are really at the forefront of using social media to reach consumers and I find it insightful to see what they are doing and the result they are seeing. That is why you are seeing more sports related social media stories.

The number of daily deal sites has exploded in the last six months with Groupon and LivingSocial the two dominate sites in this market. But while both play in the same space, there are huge differences in the geographies and demographics of the two sites.

For example the comScore analysis found that LivingSocial had more of an East Coast bias to it, while Groupon is more entrenched amongst Midwest and West Coast-based consumers.

But what are demographics? Are Groupon and LivingSocial users the same? Well comScore found that internet users under 45 leaned toward Groupon, while those ages 45 and older skewed more in favor of LivingSocial. Those ages 12 to 25 underindexed on usage of daily deal sites in general, but underindexed less strongly on Groupon. Both sites were used by women more than men.

But Nielsen found the opposite age skew when it examined the sites’ demographics in March 2011. That analysis found that 33% of LivingSocial visitors were ages 21 to 34, compared to 25% for Groupon, while 51% of LivingSocial visitors were ages 35 to 64, vs. 57% for Groupon.

But ultimately before using Groupon in LivingSocial for your business, the secret is understanding what kind of offer appears most often on each site appears. ComScore noted, is that more than half (56%) of Groupon’s offers were for restaurants, while the hefty portion of LivingSocial’s deals (41%) were for books and magazines.

The frequency of these types of offers is ultimately what drives users to use one or the other of these two sites. If you are a restaurant, then Groupon will provide a better ROI for you than LivingSocial.

When people are looking to find local businesses, search is still king according to research from the Local Search Association (formerly the Yellow Pages Association).

Two things jumped out at me when looking at this chart. One is that the yellow page numbers seem incredibly high. Have 62% of people really used the yellow pages in the last month?

The second is how far down social media is on this list. Is social media really the 9th most used source to fine a local business today? Is social media really behind newspapers, directories, store circulars and internet yellow pages?

In the survey they asked about frequency of usage, which threw up some more “interesting” information.  A majority of those ages 18 to 34 preferred search, as did a plurality of respondents ages 35 to 54. Among older users, yellow pages, and even print yellow pages alone, beat out search engines like Google.

So I expected that the use of yellow pages would skew higher amongst an older demographic. That makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is that for people between the age of 18-24 that they are more than twice as likely to use the yellow pages than a social network to find a local business. Really?

That if you combine yellow pages, internet yellow pages and print yellow pages, that 18-24 year-olds are more than 4x likely to use those sources than Facebook.Twitter to find a local business. Really?

Am I the only one astonished by these numbers?

Winning the NBA championship paid off for the Dallas Mavericks both on and off the court. The Mavs saw the biggest percentage gains in number of Facebook “likes” and number of Twitter followers among all 16 playoff teams during the 2011 postseason, up 156% and 97%, respectively, between April 15 and June 13.

All 16 teams saw double-digit percentage gains on their official Facebook pages; the league’s official page also saw a 17.5 percent bump.

Below are the counts for each team, ranked in order of Facebook gains.

Source: Sports Business Daily

Some new data shows that older users on Facebook have started to connect more with brands than they did in the past.

As recently as September 2010, based on research from Wedbush Securities, it seemed as if engaging with a brand in Facebook was just not something that interested Facebook users who are over 55. According to that report, only about one in four of Facebook’s oldest users had “liked” a brand on the site, compared with 60% of those ages 18 to 34.

By November 2010, over-55s had begun to close the gap, however, and by April 2011, nearly half were connecting with brands. Engagement had also risen among 18- to 34-year-olds as well as the 35-to-54 age group over the period. Overall, 59% of adult Facebook users had “liked” a brand as of April, up from 47% the previous September. Uptake among the oldest users appears to have been a major factor in this rise.

Percent of Facebook users who like a brand by age.

This is a really interesting change, as most brands focus on reaching out to younger demographics on Facebook. With that changing, brands now have a great opportunity to reach out to, and interact act with, seniors.

Typically, social media users connect with brands to get deals and discounts, as well as information about products and special offers. But that might not be the case for seniors. For example, affluent social media users tended to follow brands because of a preexisting affinity for them, and a desire to be kept informed.

Do you run a different campaign on Facebook to reach seniors than you do to reach a younger demographic?

eMarketer is estimating that 132.5 million people in the US will use Facebook this year, up from 116.8 million people last year. By ;2013, that number is expected to increase to 152.1 million.

Number of Facebook users in the U.S.

From the eMarketer graph above, it is quite apparent that Facebook’s growth in the U.S. is flattening out and most people who are going to use Facebook are already signed up.

The growth that Facebook is seeing is primarily amongst older boomers and seniors. At the same time, teens and young adults will continue to form the core of Facebook’s audience, with penetration rates among these groups ranging from 80% to 89% of internet users by 2013.

Between iPhone tracking, PSN hacking, Facebook fine print, and elected officials getting caught with their pants down, the ever-apparent privacy concerns that come with engaging social media have perhaps never been more exposed. The public at large is becoming more and more concerned about the guarantees of their digital privacy. Meanwhile companies and corporations are doing everything they can to harness the social networking age to better target their buyers and users. It’s an interesting series of events, with different perspectives and different motives driving a social drama that might come to dominate the history of our time: which pieces of personal information are private, and which aren’t?

Central to the corporate desire to use your Facebook profile and other deposits of your personal information dispersed across the web is the power of truth. In particular, detailed truth. It’s not enough to wait for the quality-of-service-check emails to get sent back. Companies want to pretty much know everything they can about us. It helps them market to us better, which in turn allows us to continue to be satisfied with the bargains we get and services we use. That’s why Apple doesn’t mind figuring out a way to know where you are whenever you search for things without you knowing about it. They know they aren’t using your information against you, but instead are simply just trying to provide you with better products and service.

Central to public fear is of course the utilization of our private information in ways we consider in opposition to our personal beliefs. It’s not enough for a company or social network to say they won’t “be evil”, they must disclose what parts of our private lives are fair game and what parts aren’t. This is of course done in the manner of the disclosure forms we fill out. But the product or service providers dictate the level of privacy strictly on their own. We often count on watchdog groups and savvy journalists to uncover these violations in privacy ethics.

Surveys were once the ideal way to get this kind of information. Conducted anonymously, when spread across a wide enough of a demographic range they could prove very effective in getting truth willingly from individuals. The problem was of course finding success in getting a truthful sample of the consuming population to participate. This can be fixed, however, by the advent of paid online surveys. Market research companies that incentivize survey taking are more likely to grab hold of a more diverse sample of the public. If companies are able to get accurate samples from such surveys, their obsession with getting a hold of our private information will be reduced in fervor.

That’s because, despite much of our fear, the information these companies are looking for is oftentimes simply general data that doesn’t necessarily paint a vivid picture of “you”. They want to know your age, your geographical location, and other generic details they will pool together to devise large scale advertising campaigns, sales, and enhanced customer service. The tactic is only slightly Orwellian, reflecting more of a desire to perform better marketing techniques than create a personal advertising “master profile” of you as a consumer-at-large.

Surveys mean to create wide suppositions about consumer conduct do not alleviate the corporate compulsion to mine personal information for micro-targeted advertising. Concern should always remain on whether or not drastic action needs to be taken against an entity’s right to attain information that could be used to directly influence a single consumer’s decision making. Until then feel free to lend a company your honest personal opinions. It might contribute to a decreased likelihood of them mining after it.

According to Adweek, there is bad news for brands who are rushing to social media sites. Young people don’t want to be friends with you! According to a new report from Forrester Research, just 6% of 12-17-year-olds who use the web want to be friends with a brand on Facebook.

Among Web-connected 18-24-year-olds, that figure doubles, which means that only 12% of 18-24-year-old think is ok to friend a brand. Even scarier for brands: Young people don’t want brands’ friendship, and they think brands should go away.

“Many brands are looking to social media as a strong digital channel to communicate with these consumers, since it’s where 12- to 17-year-olds are spending so much time,” wrote Jacqueline Anderson, Forrester’s Consumer Insights Analyst, who authored the report. “But research shows that it is important to consider more than just consumers’ propensity to use a specific channel. Almost half of 12- to 17-year-olds don’t think brands should have a presence using social tools at all.”

So if you are a brand on Facebook and your target audience is 12-24-years-olds what do you do? One option is to use social media as a listening tool instead of pushing your brand forward. According to Forrester’s report, while 16% of young consumers expect brands to use social media to interact with them, 28% expect those brands to listen to what they say on social sites and get back to them.

That last data point is the key one. Young consumers are basically telling brands, when I interact with you I want you to listen to me and interact with you. I don’t want to interact (friend) a brand that just engages in a one-way conversation with me.

Interesting data from  Wedbush about the types of companies that are creating Facebook fan pages. According to their data, local businesses make up 17.6% of Facebook fan pages, while companies come in at 6.3% and products at 3%.

What I wonder when I see data like this whether local businesses are turning to Facebook to create an online presence instead of building out their own web site?

I touched on the dangers of this strategy last year when I wrote a post called “Don’t Build Your Brand On A Third Party Platform”

That 6.5% of Facebook fan pages are from musicians is not a surprise considering the demise of MySpace, which is where bands used to go to get found online.