Facebook gets older

A US research agency, iStrategyLabs, has published data that shows the demographic of Facebook users in the US.

Not that I understand how this works but the data comes from Facebook's Flyers advertising system that provides a demographic analysis of the Facebook population.

As you would expect the 18-24 year olds are the main users but the high levels of growth is coming from the older demographics.

You can download the spreadsheet with the data from here.

The bottom line is:

The 35-54 year old demo is growing fastest

The 55-plus are not far behind with a 194.3% growth rate – If they had split the

55-plus into 55-66 and 65+ the growth would have been even greater.

The 25-34 year population is doubling every 6 months

Pew Internet has given us some insight into the demographics of Twitter users.

As of December 2008, 11% of online American adults said they used Twitter or another service that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others. This seems a bit of a weird definition and liable to lead to confusion?

Pew concludes that:

Nearly 19% online adults ages 18 to 24 have used Twitter and its ilk as have 20% of online adults 25 to 34.

Use of these services drops off steadily after age 35 with 10% of 35 to 44 year olds and 5% of 45 to 54 year olds using Twitter.

The decline is even more stark among older internet users; 4% of 55-64 year olds and 2% of those 65 and older use Twitter.

I do hope that we are not going to start using the use of Twitter as a measure of Web literacy, a bit like using mobile phones was the benchmark for being technology literate. Dick Stroud