Generational Preferences for Social Media

In all of our Social Media research looking at age groups and the tools they use is vital to later helping clients and agencies develop an effective strategy for their Social Media engagement.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, but there are generational differences in the types of Social Media tools preferred, namely the level of creativity or functionality a service offers. Here we provide a basic snap of these preferences which can aid in designing Social Media campaigns/projects or tools.

Generation Tech or Gen Z: Only just edging into their teens at the start end of the curve, this group is all about being “interconnected” and “networked” and use the tools to gather into formal and informal groups for short and long periods. Highly creative with the tools they are the least fearful to adopt new social technologies, they are also very fickle and not loyal if a service doesn’t meet their demands.

Millenials: They’re happy to go wild with features, functionality and ability to express. This is the crowd that likes MySpace with the ability to create all kinds of backgrounds and move things around on their MySpace page. Having grown up with these tools, there is no fear. This is a highly “networked” group and prefer to function as “many” instead of singularly. Don’t waste your time trying to find these folks in Twitter though. They prefer tools where they can clearly identify who it is they are connecting with.

Generation X: Somewhat creative and flexible, but less so than Millenials (Gen Y) they prefer systems already in place. They’ll step outside the box a little, but not much. They prefer to be guided easily and have little time to waste on fancying up pages. They get to the point. Generation X is a little less “network” oriented than Millenials.

Boomers: Set the framework. Good UI is critical for this generation. They’re not as comfortable as any previous generation with Social Media. They use an average of no more than 3 Social Media tools, those usually being one Social Network (i.e. Facebook) on photo sharing (i.e Flickr) and email. It’s not about funky features, bells and whistles with this group. They’re more fearful of changes, like their privacy and are less “network” oriented online.

Silent Generation or Pre-Boomer: Extremely limited use of Social Media tools with email being the preferred tool, although we see some uptake with Skype and certainly Facebook. This group, when they use the tools, use them mostly for family and close friend communications.

Methodology:

These insights are the results of aggregating our research findings from over 180 research projects for the business, NGO and government sectors since 2008 where age has been a factor in strategy development. This aggregate data represents the summation of looking at over 100,000 people across these generations in the United States, Canada and UK.

For a more comprehensive report and breakdown of tool preferences by country and region we do offer reports to clients for purchase. Naturally. This is our business after all.

(Author, G. Crouch, CEO)

Social Media Use in Atlantic Canada: 2010 Report

We’re delighted to provide here the 2nd annual Atlantic Conversations II Report on Social Media Use in Atlantic Canada. The information here is downloadable (below) in PDF format and is the data we’ve made publicly available for general consumption under Creative Commons license. A more detailed, 30 page version is available at $450.

Social Media use in Atlantic Canada continued to climb in 2009. The biggest service to see growth was Twitter, while the average age of a Facebook user climbed to 53 this year. In terms of being active in Social Media channels, New Brunswick lead the way. We did see some leaps for Newfoundland & Labrador as well as PEI.

You can download the PDF report here. If you’d like the pay version, please contact us directly.

Atlantic Conversations: Social Media in Atlantic Canada

We’re finally pleased to be releasing the public version of our report on Social Media use in Atlantic Canada, or a we’ve named it Atlantic Conversations 2008. The report is available at this link for download (atlantic-conversations-08-report) in pdf format. We note that this is the public version. A premium version with more specific provincial and user data is available, for a price of course. After all, we are a business.

Essentially, we uncover that Social Media use is growing in Atlantic Canada, as quickly as anywhere else. Similar to most markets, while many engage, few engage on more regular basis. While 73% of Atlantic Canadians are online, we estimate about 85% of the online population are using some form of social media bi-weekly at least while 15% use social media services regularly. Atlantic Canada has an approximate population of 2.6 Million according to Statistics Canada.

All provinces are delivering broadband service to rural areas and as much of that will begin to take effect in 2009, we anticipate even more social media usage taking place. Media consumption habits are changing in Atlantic Canada and people are increasingly getting their news online and local, community news as well. This represents both a threat and opportunity to newspapers and magazines in the print industries.

We hope you enjoy the report and find useful and helpful information. Feel free to email or call us with any questions.

(Author: Giles Crouch, Managing Partner)