Social Networking in the UK

I am getting bored with social networking. Not social networking itself but the subject. Been there done that. But, a lot of people are interested and any marketer who is not asking themselves how best to use it needs to be fired.

OFCOM has just published a report about social networking in the UK. It is free and it is good.
See the above charts for a taster of what it contains.

The first chart shows responses to the question:” Have you set up your own page or profile on a website such as Piczo, Bebo, hi5, Facebook or MySpace “? This research was part of Ofcom’s media literacy audit December 2007.

The second chart (from the same source) shows the membership of the main networks by age.

Nothing very surprising other than higher use of Facebook by the 50-64 year old group and the higher use of networks by the lower social economic groups, even though they use the internet less than the ABs. Do I detect that social networking has a class dimension? Dick Stroud