Social Media Demographics and Technographics

As Well Rounded Marketers, we want data to help understand our marketplaces accurately and to make balanced decisions. This is especially important with social media, a quickly moving target with standardized measurement tools, methodologies and businesses only emerging.

Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li (both of Forrester Research) wrote a seminal book last year (not quite ancient history yet) but a great place to start for a comprehensive set of case studies of businesses using social media and useful measurement methodologies. Included is a useful framework for evaluating the stages of social media participation which they call the Social Technographics Ladder. Each step up in the ladder represents a group of consumers more involved in social media than the step below. To be categorized in a particular segment, they must have participated in that activity at least once in the last month. Here is the ladder (click to enlarge):


And here's a link to an 8 slide presentation on the ladder.

Now for the good part. They also provide a profile tool so that you can generate a snapshot of how many consumers fall in each technographic segment organized by three demographic criteria: age, country and gender.

Here's a snapshot of my demographics (45-54, U.S., Male):



I was surprised that versus the whole population, my group of baby boomer men is at or above the average in being "critics" and "collectors". I had assumed that this would be more strongly skewed to the younger demographics.

It's worth going to the tool and sorting by different demographics to see where your assumptions are awry and to see how different demographic groups compare. And remember, this is 2008 data. Social media usage has grown dramatically since then. Facebook has 200% annual growth as of March (to 91M) and Twitter has 1200% growth(to 14M). Some of this is international growth but US penetration has also grown substantially.

My hope is that they add a time dimension to this already useful tool and framework so we can see growth velocity by various demographics and technographics.