Social Media Gets Rural

Likely, most of us associate Social Media usage with the under 25 crowd and city slickers. There’s two things wrong with that assumption and a trend we’re noticing in Atlantica (New England and Atlantic Canada.) Here’s what we’re seeing.

Social Media Use by Age: There’s a plethora of research showing average ages (this old RapLeaf study said youth last year and that’s already changed.) Here in Atlantica our own research shows an increase in the average age of a Facebook participant from 47 in late 2008 to 53 by August of 2009. Twitter shows the most usage by the 30+ crowd and MySpace is the hang-out of youth. Social Media is not the exclusive domain of youth.

Rural Usage: As governments in New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland has funded high-speed infrastructure into rural areas, we’ve monitored Social Media activities in those areas since 2008.

What we’ve found is that as new areas are “lit up” so to speak, usage of tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, FastPitch, Flickr and blogs spikes. In Cape Breton as the Straight-Highlands area expanded Internet access, Social Media usage rose steady as new communities came online. In the small community of Arichat as it came online for high-speed we saw over 150 residents go on Facebook within 3 weeks and a 20% increase in photo’s posted in online photo services with Arichat tags and locations. In Southern Vermont, we saw a similar increase to Arichat, in fact, almost exactly the same numbers in the area of Hanover.

This is but a small sampling of research indicating rural uptake of Social Media services. For marketers, the rural markets are reachable in an affordable way. For general thought, this shows people in rural areas are finding their voice as well. The more communities going on line, the more we will hear from the rural voice. This is relevant in terms of where we will see significant growth and I suspect, participation, in Social Media services over the next year. As wireless carriers push 3G and other similar services into these markets as well, we expect to see increased use of mobile Facebook and Twitter apps. Increasingly, Social Media will get very local. Soon smaller, regional and local businesses will have to take notice even more than today.

(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Director)