Youth & Social Media in Atlantica

As we’re constantly monitoring Social Media use in the Atlantica region, here we release some high-level findings from this years ongoing research.

We define “youth” as 20 and under in this market. This research comes from a sample population of 1,500 within the Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and PEI and the U.S. states of New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine  and Connecticut.

Social Network: Started out the year as MySpace (as expected) but has seen an increased use of Facebook (by 42% over 2008).

Social Places & Games: Club Penguin was most popular in the 7-12 age range while second was Miniclip and Yahooligans by Yahoo! was a close third for games services. For the 12-16 range we found Our World to be most popular. Picnik proved most popular for photo’s due to the services offered for photo manipulation. YouTube topped for videos, followed by Vimeo as a distant second.

Social Communications: MSN seemed to be the choice for “chatting” with second being eBuddy and GTalk a distant third followed by AIM and ICQ, Mebo was second to eBuddy for connecting multiple services . Controls and some of the features enabled on MSN were the deciding factor for usage. Apple’s iChat barely registered use in the under 20 bracket.

We noted that the under 20 age range for Social Media tools enjoy services that provide creative outlets. Picnik as an example enables a wide range of free editing capabilities before a premium service kicks in. A habit of youth seems to be editing photo’s in a service like Picnik and then sharing them on Facebook or via messenging services.

We found that 53% of females are more active than males, although we were surprised to see such an equal usage whereas in the 20+ range we find women are 65% more active than men in Social Media, specifically Social Networking services.

There was almost no difference in services used between Canada and the U.S. A finding we found encouraging in the sense of cross-border relations as these youth grow up.

The in-depth report has been made available to select clients and is available for $750.