Like Google's ad platform, the new MySpace ad platform allows anyone to establish an account and begin targeting ads to a particular demographic. Unlike Google, however, MySpace allows users to build image-based ads on the fly. What's more, advertisers will find the targeting options get exceptionally "granular."

Unlike traditional online advertising demographics, however, the MySpace targeting includes some very MySpace-specific options, including "drinking," "partying," and professional wrestling:

And this type of granularity - providing a true view into its user base - could be the key to MySpace's success.

In fact, when announcing the private beta of the service last year, MySpace claimed that this new "hypertargeting" technology would drastically improved online advertising with results "as high as 300% over demographically tageted ads."

To date, all popular social networking sites have struggled with converting a wealth of users into a sustainable revenue stream. MySpace is no different.

Advertising seems to be the most viable means of doing that. And with the information at its disposal, perhaps no one is better positioned to provide targeted advertising than MySpace.

Will advertisers adopt this "hypertargeted" platform with the same vigor that has catapulted Google to such incredible heights? That remains to be seen. But one thing is for sure, with myAds, MySpace has taken a decided step forward in attempting to drive revenue using its most valuable asset: its users.

In a recent study by Anderson Analytics, the demographics and psychographics of social networking users on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn were revealed. The ultimate goal was to provide marketers with information about users' interests and buying habits as related to their network of choice. The end result is a detailed look at the profiles and habits of social networking users on the web today. Here we'll delve into the details about the specific networks studied.

Facebook

As we've heard before, Facebookers are older and better off. They are more likely to be married (40%), white (80%) and retired (6%) than users of the other social networks. They have the second-highest average income ($61,000) and an average of 121 connections.

In general, there is no one area of interest for this group of social networkers. Out of 45 categories, national news, sports, exercise, travel, and home and garden skewed only slightly higher than the rest. This is likely because this network has the most users and contains a high number of users within each demographic.

Facebookers are also extremely loyal: 75% say Facebook is their favorite site and 59% say they've increased their use in the past 6 months.

MySpace

MySpace users are young and there are less of them on the site than there were in the past. Even those participants who reported using MySpace said they had used the site less in the past six months.

The users of this network are more interested in having fun, specifically in the areas of entertaining friends, humor and comedy, and video games. They're less into exercise than any other network. Oddly enough, despite the youth-skewed demographics, they seek out parenting info more than users of any other network.

The average income of the MySpace user is the lowest ($44,000). They're more likely to be black (9%) or Hispanic (7%) and single (60%) and students (23%).

Twitter

Twitter users are more likely to be employed part-time (16% vs. 11% average) and have an average income of $58,000. The average Twitter user has 28 followers and follows 32 others.

The Twitter group is especially interested in news, restaurants, sports, politics, personal finance, and religion. They're also really into pop culture with music, movies, TV and reading ranking higher than average. Their buying habits reflect those interests, with this group being more likely to buy books, movies, shoes, and cosmetics.

However, this group is not that loyal to the network: 43% said they could live without Twitter.

LinkedIn

It should come as no surprise that a network of business users is the one that has the highest average income ($89,000). Also not surprising is that LinkedIn users joined the network for business or work purposes, specifically for keeping in touch with business networks, job searching, business development, and recruiting.

They tend to like news, employment information, sports, and politics. They're also more likely to be into the gym, spas, yoga, golf and tennis. Interestingly enough - and perhaps because they can afford to do so - LinkedIn users own more electronic gadgets than users of any of the other social networkers. In particular, they enjoy digital cameras, high-definition TVs, DVRs and Blu-ray players.

However, when these guys unwind, they have some interesting interests: gambling and soap operas. 12% seek gambling information online (vs. an average of 7%), while 10% go online for soap-opera content (vs. an average of 5%).

This group is more likely to be male - it's ratio of male to female users is 57% to 43%.

Conclusion

The findings of this study have confirmed in some cases what we already knew about the different demographics of these networks. However, they're still helpful since the more sources that confirm the same demographics, the more likely they are to be accurate. In addition, by surveying social networkers' interests, the study reveals some interesting insights into the various groups, like how one group is more pop-culture focused and another spends more time at the gym. That info is invaluable to marketers looking to best capitalize on their social network ad spending.

Anderson Analytics will be releasing the full report next week. If you're interested, you can check their site for more details.

To give them what they want, it helps to know who they are. With the integration of Google+ into search, Google's social network will become an increasingly important part of the Web. By Google's count, it has 90 million users already. If you want to have a presence in Google search, active participation on Google+ is a good idea. I tested a tool for understanding the Google+ audience today and found some interesting insights.

The tools at PlusDemographics.com gather many of the basic statistics one needs to understand who uses Google+. They offer a free global report that they compiled by crawling 45 million public profiles, a very healthy sample of the estimated total, and normalizing the somewhat erratic data they got to within acceptable limits.

As it stands in January 2012, 70.38% of Google+ users identify as male, 28.77% are female, and the remainder fall into Google's third category: "other." Nearly 80% of users fall into the 18-34 age brackets. Over 30% of users are from the U.S., followed by around 14% from India, although the #2 state/region and seven of the top 10 cities are in India.

The majority of Google+ users surveyed are not active on Facebook or Twitter. 99.7% are not active on Foursquare. Google+ is a different place altogether from the rest of the social Web. How do my own followers compare?

Personal Google+ Demographics

PlusDemographics also offers personal reports for a fee. Single reports cost $4.99 for personal profiles and $9.95 for business pages. There are discounts for buying reports in packs. Personal reports crawl up to 10,000 followers, which ought to be enough to get a sense. It gives you general demographic information about your people as a whole, and it highlights some individual users following you based on their "prominence" on the network. Here's what it found from mine:

Almost 87% of my encirclements identify as male. That's a pretty remarkable indication of the demographics of people who follow tech bloggers on Google+.

The age breakdown is comparable to the global population, trending slightly older, which I find flattering.

The majority of my Google+ followers do use Facebook, which is different from the general population. Almost none are active on Klout, but that's more than in the global report, which found less than 0.1% used Klout.

These are all very basic data points, of course. Only a rough understanding of my encirclements is possible from these data. The way to get to know the people they represent is by talking to them, sharing with them and following their links.

How do you get to know the people on your social networks?

The use of short code text messaging is very popular these days. Millions of people vote for the next American Idol star via text message, and just as many have donated money to the Red Cross during times of need right from their phones. Part of the reason for this popularity is the ease by which it is done, as well as the ubiquitous nature of text messaging.

Even the most basic mobile devices can send text messages, and texting is huge among younger generations who use it as a 24/7 lifeline to their friends. Cell phone use is especially high among less affluent demographics of society who may not be able to afford a broadband internet connection, but can certainly swing a cheap basic cell phone.

Now with Fast Follow, anyone can start following tweets as easy as they vote on American Idol or donate to the Red Cross. Now business, organizations and even people can say, "Follow me on Twitter by texting 'Follow @chcameron' to 40404," and people will know what that means and how to do it. There is much more familiarity with SMS short codes than there is with signing up for Twitter and following people that way.

What's more - letting non-users receive alerts is a great way to let people dip their toes in before jumping head first into the vast ocean that is Twitter. It is curious, however, to consider how being able to follow a user without an account will affect a user's follow count. Will a new category emerge that will tell us how many non-users are following?

Either way, it would not be surprising to see this decision pay off very well for Twitter in terms of adding users to the service - perhaps even from new demographics.

They are described as "struggling with tech every day, just like you". Yes it's kind of lame, but no doubt there is a market for a tech products portal aimed at non-geeks. 

One thing that makes me feel uneasy about Yahoo Tech is the overwhelming consumer focus - it's all about "buying the latest gear" and is described as "product central". Consumerism is still normal in mainstream media these days, but on the Web I've become used to a more 'prosumer' form of commercialism. This quote from the NY Times interview of Patrick Houston, the general manager of Yahoo Tech, sums up the slightly out-of-kilter mainstream consumer focus:

"Technology is a form of self-expression," Mr. Houston said. "You are what gadgets you carry."

Also the advisor blogs look contrived and sound hokey - "I just zipped over to Amazon to price Microsoft Office: $407.99 for the full version that includes Access. Wow. That's a lot of money." Perhaps the advisors will grow into their role, but it all strikes me as a bit bland and as if they're following a script. Then again, I'm not in any of the target demographics - and I'm not being sarcastic or ironic (like us Gen Xers are wont to do), I really am just saying that I'm not in the target demographics.

But on a positive note, the "tech is made easy" angle is great and I really hope this pulls in the punters. Technology is too damn hard most of the time and "real" people won't get much down-to-earth tech advice by reading my blog, for example. They're probably better off getting their tech product advice from people who are just like them. Plus there are a lot of great 2.0 features in the portal - reviews, ratings, social networking, tag clouds, questions and answers, etc. So like TechCrunch, I'm taking a 'wait and see' approach with this. It looks promising, but at the same time also looks a bit too calculated. More at NY Times.

In August 2010, the average Orkut user spent 275.8 minutes on the site, and only 29.3 minutes on Facebook. By December 2010, the average Brazilian user's time on Facebook creeped up to 37 minutes. One year later, that number had shot up to an average 4.8 hours on Facebook.

"Brazil has always been a particularly social market and currently owns the fifth largest social networking population in the world," said Alex Banks, comScore managing director for Brazil. "But despite the cultural affinity for social media, Facebook adoption had traditionally lagged in the market."

It's true: Brazillians are very community-oriented people. Orkut also is easy to pronounce in Portuguese because of the "ch" T sound. According to SearchEngineWatch, the lack of advertising on Orkut also appealed to Brazilians.

The ComScore report reveals a few more interesting data points about demographics of Brazilian Facebook users. They are 50.9% female and 49.1% male. The majority of users are under age 35, with 30.6% aged 25-34 and 28.2% aged 15-24 years-old. A few other interesting statistics stick out: 34.2% of those users live in São Paulo, and 12.9% reside in Rio de Janeiro.

SearchEngineJournal brings together a few different ideas about Orkut's heyday and, not-so-surprisingly, the reasons it prevailed for so long may have to do with bragging rights, nationalism and the Portuguese language. And in 2008, Google moved its Orkut headquarters to Brazil.

We reached out to ComScore for more information about Orkut's demographics in December 2011, when Facebook overtook it. Interestingly, Orkut Brazil's demographics are very similar to Facebook Brazil's. People 15-24 make up 31.4% of the site, and 30.8% of users are people ages 25-34. Orkut is comprised of 51.7% women and 48.3% male; 32.5% of users live in São Paulo, and 12.1% are in Rio de Janiero.

Right after the ComScore numbers came out, Google launched an Orkut app for the iPhone. It looks like they're just too late.

The data seem to confirm the popular conception that Google Plus users overwhelmingly identify as male (71.24%). The dominant age bracket (35%) is 25-34. The U.S. is by far the most represented country on Google Plus, with roughly three times the user base as India. The top 10 most common occupations of Google Plus users are dominated by tech jobs, with engineers (1.77%), developers (1.02%), designers (0.82%) and software engineers (0.72%) taking the top spots. And, by a wide margin, the top employer of Google Plus users is Google itself.

Bime pulled most of their data from Find People on Plus, a third-party member directory. They analyzed a sample of 4,412,227 users, which, according to estimates, is probably over one fifth of the entire user base. The age distribution data is from comScore, not from Find People on Plus, so the sample is not the same.

Bime admits that the data is "a few weeks old," so demographics may have shifted. As we noted last week, user behavior on Google Plus appears to be changing. But Bime's dashboard is still probably a reliable picture of who the early Google Plus adopters are.