Survey: Young Adults Think Facebook is #1; Women More Into it Than Men
A new survey released this week by the marketing analysts and consultants at Anderson Analytics found that Facebook is now the #1 most liked website among US respondents between the ages of 18 and 24. In other words, it's not just tech bloggers talking about Facebook all the time.
The sample set for the survey consisted of 1,000 young people suckered into answering questions and viewing ads at the "analyst" company's website, Brandport.com, and 500 Facebook users - for a total of 1500 respondents. Perhaps our headline should then read "Young Facebook Users Think Facebook is #1." The release is here, I found it via Kathleen Mazzocco.
Last year's #1 spot was held by MySpace and presuming the study surveyed 1/3 of its respondents on Facebook then as well, this is a big change. I can say anecdotally that everywhere I look I see laptops (other than mine) on Facebook all the time. You can read our in-depth comparison of MySpace and Facebook here.
Gender Differences
Gender differences in the survey were marked; use of social networking sites was twice as high in self-identified women as it was in men, only 33% of women said they were satisfied to use just one social networking site and MySpace was the #2 favorite for women while falling out of the top 5 for men.
The survey's authors say they believe this shows that the social networking world is set to change drastically when today's youth replace contemporary adults in the workplace. Social networking is currently believed to be much more common among adult men.
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I went over to read the original Anderson Analytics press release and saw that they only claim Facebook to be #1 among "college students." It's a pretty egregious mistake to equate "college students" with "young adults," as you did. Keep in mind that many young people don't have the opportunity (or the motivation) to go to college, and "young adults" can broadly include high school students and recent college grads also.
Among high schools, an interesting phenomenon is that Facebook has penetrated the "good" schools but hasn't made a dent into the "bad" schools. See my blog post here calculating the correlation between Facebook usage and school ranking for data supporting that conclusion.
I don't understand the point about them including 500 FB users in a test of only 1500. If I went and picked 1000 random people and 500 from MySpace wouldn't the numbers probably more skewed towards MySpace?
Also I'm unclear on these 2 sentences: "...use of social networking sites was twice as high in self-identified women as it was in men" and "Social networking is currently believed to be much more common among adult men."
@Chuck, good point, I apologize for that mistake. See also danah boyd's exploration of economic class and facebook/myspace
@Antje - I agree with you regarding your first point, in regards to your second it's the age difference being discussed, the first sentence you quote is referring to the young people surveyed, the second to older, working adults.
Marshall - ok now I follow. Read it at least 5 times and wasn't catching the correlation. Thx for the clarification - this area is interesting to me so just wanted to be sure.
Facebook has long been #1 among Hish school students, so now its also #1 among college students, therefore "US Youth" is a fair statement.
The survey above was among 1000 US college students representing well over 350 colleges & universities. The Facebook sample of 500 was not used in determining the ranking fo facebook, but rather a post follow up to investigate use of SNS after Facebook was establised as #1