We live in a marketing world fascinated with talk of Facebook, YouTube, and MySpace. They're the first thing that jump to mind when you discuss social media or social networks with perhaps a distant 4th being the omni-present "blogosphere". As we descend on each network voraciously it's easy to forget to step back sometimes and really evaluate who you're reaching through each network.

I stumbled across a useful blog post at Ignite's social media blog. You can download the social network demographic document I'm referencing here.

It brings together demographic data like the gender, age, education, and household income of it's user base in conjunction with a google trends graph indicating search volume for the domain over time by country. Obviously the google trends data isn't a clear indicator of site traffic, but it should be able to give you a good idea of the traffic a site might get in relation to another by using sites like Facebook and MySpace as a benchmark. Facebook receives about 4 million unique visitors a day these days and MySpace comes in at about 3.5 million.

Here were the data points that I found really interesting and stood out to me, but I encourage you to dig in yourself and see what you notice.

• It seemed like there was a trend for there to be a skew towards female users on social networks, but towards men on social news sites.
• I was surprised to see how heavily used business social networks are by users over 45. In most cases it seems like almost 45% of LinkedIn and Plaxo were over 45 years old.
• MySpace skews younger and towards a less educated lower income group in comparison to Facebook. It also has a disproportionately higher number of female users. (Ironically I met my girlfriend of almost three years on MySpace.)
• Across almost all instances I found the indication of usage in different countries in Africa, South America, and Asia particularly interesting particularly for networks founded in the west.
• Bebo, Lambored, and Habbo are some of the few social networks that seem to be a great place to reach youth in an environment that seems more focused on their culture.
• Anyone who reads this and doesn't believe social networks have gone mainstream and that it's without question no longer skewed to youth is insane.