Lollipop Local

Further to my post about British businesses being scared of Social Media because it was a waste of time, in July 2011, You Say Pays interviewed 2387 adults in the UK about how frequently they used a selection of Social Media platforms.

The research was turned into an infographic by Vapour and a paper by PR agency Umpf.

Facebook

The study reveals that, whilst Facebook is the UK’s most popular social networking site with 77% of adults having an active profile, it is also the preferred platform of women, with over 80% of them using it vs only 72% of men.

In terms of age, 95% of 18=25s have an active profile, reducing to 55% of over 65s.

YouTube

Was the next most popular platform with around two-thirds of both men and women admitting to regular viewing and, when comparing the age groups, this usage remained constant in the under 54s but still showed over one third of the over 65s partial to a video clip.

Linked In

With 22% of men using it as opposed to only 13% of their female counterparts, Linked In is the province of middle management and the epitome of social media for business with 23% of the 25-34 year old age group admitting to a Linked In profile to connect on a professional level in order to further their careers but only 14% of under 24s getting in on this action. Geographically, one in five people living in the South-East has an account, probably due to its proximity to the business centre of the City.

However, it was the residents of the South-West who had the highest incidence of social media use on Facebook and Twitter.

What did surprise me was the 15% or 7.2 million people who said that they used Foursquare, the location-based platform. My own experience of this has been confined to seeing various friends announce that they have been made Mayor of certain places. When I tried to use it myself, I found that it was very difficult to add new places and joining personally seemed to invite requests for friendship from people that I didn’t know.

I know that it is big in the States so I will continue to keep an open mind and hope that it becomes easier for local businesses to become part of the game.

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Tags: social networking UK stats

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 15th, 2011 at 12:23 pm and is filed under Social Media, Social Media For Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.