At Attentio we are interested understanding new memes or trends that arise in the blogosphere, forums and of course social networks. Recently there has been much written regarding social networks and the amount of users have risen dramatically. Obviously the user behaviour and demographic breakdown of these communities is of interest to advertisers and marketers (and to Attentio) given the vast money paid for Myspace, significant venture capital investment in this area and the Google, Myspace cooperation.

In terms of the demographic breakdown, this is how we see the split:

- Myspace is primarily aimed at teenagers with an average age 17-19, median age is probably lower. It has 80% of all social network users. (see wikipedia link above)
- Bebo, Facebook, Univillage are aimed at the University age group say an average age of 20-22
- www.consumating.com is new and a little different but average age is about 25-28, we did the maths ourselves based on their published data. It feels like they are aiming at a different group of people definitely older than the previous two.
- Linkedin.com and other career focussed networks are likely to have an average age of 30+

It will be interesting to see:

- Can Myspace keep university students in the network or will they suffer serious churn?
- At what age will Myspace see major drop off or will they evolve to handle different age groups?
- Where are the networks that focus on the baby boomers (Born after WW2 but before 1965) are they out there now or are the user habits just too different to younger generations who live on the web not just use it as a tool? There is a good article here explaining the difference between internet as a tool versus internet as a place to live.

As more companies are interested in understanding what goes on in these networks it is clear that the demographic make up is vitally important. More on this later!

Social media is about more than blogs and forums, and viral videos are a good example of this. YouTube a web based video sharing site claims today more than a 100 million video downlaods a day. The sites huge popularity is showing no sign of slowing down, to the contrary according to Alexa, YouTube’s growth has outpaced popular blog platforms like myspace.com and blogger.com. Big brands such as Coke and Mentos have recently seen the exposure (good or bad is being debated) that is possible with 2000 videos and millions of views on YouTube with Mentos exploding when put into Coke. From the point of view of social media monitoring the breadth and diversity of people generated content continually creates new challenges but also great opportunities!

Firstly, I should say thank you to Neville Hobson whose blog I read recently and where I got these useful facts. Neville has come across interesting reports highlighting the growth of the European blogosphere with one specifically on UK blogs. (This is a subject close to our hearts as we track blogs and sell insights such as new trends and marketing effectiveness to corporate clients.)

We’ve mentioned in previous posts that the French blogosphere is substantial with 5 million blogs in the skyblog platform alone. The UK blogosphere is also growing, the article can be seen here with additional commentary by Shane Richmond. The report was commissioned by MSN Spaces so there might be issues with impartiality of the study, but the numbers are indicative of higher involvement (up to 7 million bloggers in the UK) and a heavy bias for blogging by young people (up to 42% of under 25s blogging.) From our point of view these numbers “feel” a little high but unquestionably the impact of blogging on UK internet behaviour is very significant.

Watching the cultural differences in Europe both in numbers of participants and posting behaviour is crucial and we will be blogging more about this in the future. It is clear now that UK and France are where most blog conversations take place in Europe but countries in Scandinavia and Poland are emerging.