Atlantic Conversations 4: Social Media in Atlantic Canada

We’re delighted to be releasing our 4th annual report on social media use in Atlantic Canada – the “Atlantic Conversations IV” report that was launched at Podcamp Halifax on January 22nd, 2012. We thank the largest number of attendees ever to the event and hope this information is helpful to clients and anyone else interested.

Click on the hyper-link to download the free PDF with analysis: AtlanticConvo4-Badger 2011.

Key Findings:
Our key findings in 2011 were as follows;

- When it comes to youth, the place to connect with them is on Tumblr and the best creative is video

- For adults, while Facebook remains popular, the trend is for people engaging more in “niche” social networks on platforms like Ning for their hobbies and interests.

- For use of social media apps on Smartphones, it’s the 30-39 age bracket that uses them more than youth. This was a surprise.

- Nova Scotia continues to lead overall use of social media in the four Atlantic provinces, but New Brunswick is catching up quickly.

- LinkedIn was the social network that grew the most over 2010 for businesses.

- Businesses continue to have low engagement in social media. In 2012 this could cost them revenues as consumers increasingly look to discuss regional brands and services.

- The “buy local” trend of discussions and consumers recommending grew and it expected to become ever more important in 2012.

- Governments both provincially and municipally are increasing their presence but it is slow. Nova Scotia government leads the way of the four provinces, but their engagement is faced with the challenges of complexity, available resources and ensuring protection of privacy with regard to individuals.

- When it comes to consumers or citizens engaging with brands and government – they want authenticity and to feel a real person is engaging with them in an authentic way to build trust. Standard “spin” lines are likely to cause friction.

A more detailed version of the report is available for CAD$995.00 and can be requested by emailing or calling us. We ask that if you use the content herein that you provide attribution and respect the Creative Commons license. The presentation made at Podcamp Halifax can be found on Slideshare at this link.

- The MediaBadger Team

How Age Groups Use Social Media Differently

Over 30? Well, you prefer text-based content, you’re more likely to use Flickr and you’ll fuss over photo editing but rarely record, edit and upload a video. Under 30? You love video and if you’re female you’d prefer to edit photo’s than video.

These are just some of our findings into 2010 in our ongoing look at how we’re using Social Media channels and the technologies that product content. Remember, today, everyone is a producer.

Youth: This market, under 30, prefers video to photo’s, yet interestingly enough, women prefer to edit and then share photo’s whereas boys prefer to create, record, edit and share video content. Additionally, youth (under 30) are more likely to participate in marketing promotions that have some form of participation that includes ranking content, changing content or somehow manipulating outcomes.

Adults: Those of us over 30 (sadly I’m one), well, we like to mess with photo’s more than video and we are prolific when it comes to writing. In an analysis of blogs across North America (we sampled profiles indicating 30+ to over 40,000 blogs) we found that the +30 crowd actually reads, whereas the -30 crowd prefers to massage video and watch. Interesting hey?

Marketers…if you want to engage the under 30 market segment…give them something to do with your content. That’s what they’re interested in. Over 30…stop being boring, but we’ll share your content if it’s interesting. Boring content? Don’t waste your money. The Web really is about “action” and the moment you forget that, you lose.

Want more information? Give us a holler and we can let you know what’s happening by generations or age groups and we can slice it six ways from, well, boring old Sunday.

(Author: G. Crouch)

Age Groups & Social Media: Open vs. Closed Networks

At the dawn of the public Internet, in those ancient times of the mid-90′s, the bad news stories of the Web were all about the pervs and stalkers, spams and scams. Traditional news media, perhaps fearing what was to come for their industry, feasted on each bad news story. And parents reacted, as they should. Parental software controls came out in browsers and we took care to monitor our kids.

Good news. It largely worked. This result is what we see in our research into Social Media use almost daily. Under 25 and this demographic prefers more “controlled” networks. The average age of Facebook users is in the 40′s because it is parents watching over their kids (in large part) and then re-connecting with friends from days gone by.

The under 25 age group in social media engagement are much more wary of who they connect with. While that may seem odd to those who’ve seen teens with 500+ friends and you know they don’t have that many friends, it’s how those relationships are managed. More often, Facebook or MySpace is used to control those they don’t really want to connect with. A common habit of under 20′s is to easily accept “friends” on MySpace or Facebook, but to also drop large amounts every few months.

The “conversations” that take place in Social Media channels are more often held via txt messaging, Instant Messaging services, chat in Facebook etc. Services that tend to enable tighter control of the group. These reflect the tighter social circles found in daily life by teens and youth.

As we age and are exposed to greater forms of social relationships, workplace socialization etc., we are better able to manage our private and public lives (not to say we adults aren’t goofing that up in these new mediums!) thus engaging in services like Twitter, FourSquare or Yelp are easier for adults.

So basically youth (under 25) prefer more “closed” networks while adults are comfortable in both open and closed social networks. Additionally, it’s key to remember that many Social Network services today are used by people to more effectively manage relationships – to hold at bay those they don’t really want to connect with.

(Author: Giles Crouch)

Age Groups and Social Media Usage Patterns: October 2009

Some of our findings in our latest analysis of Social Media use in New England, Atlantic Canada and Southern England. Our focus was on the 30+ demographics.

Research has shown women spend more time on Facebook than men. Our research into social media use in Atlantic Canada, New England and Southern England has backed this up. We’ve also noticed that different age groups perceive the technologies differently and use them for different purposes. Here’s some of what we’ve found that we can share:

Age 30-40: They’re driving much of what’s happening with social technologies, not the under 30 range. But are more conservative than the under 30 crowd. They’ll use social technologies for work and play, but more so than the 40-55 demographic. This group is also more open to leveraging newer services. PC age range in this group was about 2 years old. This group also adopts newer browsers with the majority using IE7 and FireFox.

Age 40-55: A very engaged segment and they will use social technologies for both work and purely social connection with friends. This age group is still fascinated with connecting to high-school and university contacts their parents couldn’t have enjoyed. The 40-50 crowd were also early adopters of the Web and so their usage behaviours correlate with earlier technologies. This range will use 3 or more social technologies and are 82% more likely to look at a new social media service. PC age in this group was an average of 2.5 years old.

Age 55 – 65: Are primarily motivated by their teen to early 20′s children who are often geographically separated by school or early career work. This age group prefers social technologies that enable picture sharing and family connections. Their secondary reason is personal hobbies, sharing with those of a similar mind. This group is not inclined to investigate new services. They’re more likely to stick with what they started with. They remain somewhat skeptical of technology and shy. This group will use 1-3 social technologies and are somewhat more likely to adopt new software and browsers with 42% using IE6 or 7 and the rest FireFox or Safari. PC age in this group was an average of 3 years old.

Age 65+: While still the smallest segment, this is changing. They’re preference is family connectivity over 90% of the time in the 1,500 people we surveyed. We found that this group tends to only engage in 1-2 social applications such as Facebook and a photo sharing site. They are extremely conservative in adopting new social technologies and consume most digital media through 2-3 sites. We also found this group very reluctant to change software apps they’ve grown comfortable with. In this demographic we found the highest continued use of IE6 (at 76%) and older PC’s (average age of PC being 5 yrs old.)

What we did find interesting was the commonalities across three different countries in each age group. There are some cultural differences, but I’m afraid we had to reserve those for paying clients. As could also be expected, privacy concerns escalated with age.

Methodology: We surveyed 3500 respondents via an online survey and email with a 75% completion rate. This was done over a period of 30 days. We surveyed people in Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and Connecticut, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, PEI and Newfoundland then Surrey, Berkshire, Kent and Hampshire in England.

Age Groups and Social Media Habits

As we spend a lot of time monitoring social media and the tools used, we are constantly looking at the data for broader insights into the how’s and why’s of social media as a whole. One aspect that’s always intrigued me is how various demographics use different tools. Here’s some of the key insights we’ve learned lately.

Ages 12-25: Tend to use more mobile social media tools, such as SMS/txt and mobile oriented social media tools. This pattern we’ve seen in the USA, Canada and Western Europe (especially Europe, but no surprise there.) This bracket also spends more time on MySpace, followed by NetLog and Bebo in Europe. This segment loves video and anything text better be short and sweet.

Ages 25-45: This group crosses over in a mix between Web-based and mobile usage. The most popular social media tool for this group is email, although we note a trend towards more use of Social Networking tools for communication. This group prefers Facebook followed by NetLog. We note that NetLog is 2nd to Facebook in Europe. Mobile usage of social tools seems to be around Twitter, Blackberry messenger or iPhone apps. We find so many similarities in usage patterns across these groups that we decided to lump the 25-45 group together, when they are ordinarily split into two segments. This group also likes less text in blogs and on websites and enjoys video. Their content creation however, remains heavily text-oriented and very little use of video.

Ages 46-55: This group generally sticks to the Web (about 90% of the time) rarely using SMS/txt messaging. They’ll use a blog but rarely a microblog. This group is likely to print and read a document on paper rather than a monitor. They are more distrustful of social media and the content therein. Their approach to content creation is textual and rarely visual through video and images.

55 and over: From 56 to 65 we see fairly regular use of Social Media and this seems to be driven as the result of familial communications. New tools are not easily adopted and this age range is more politically conservative and traditional in their media consumption habits (radio, TV, print news.) Use of social tools seems to be on services like Facebook where they can work within a set framework.

Once we get over 65, use of social tools drops significantly as would be expected. Clearly there are generational preferences to the tools available. One issue we did notice is that the under 25 bracket have little to no loyalty to a specific service, whereas the 25-45 bracket are far more loyal to a social tool/service.