Report: Half of Americans Are Now Social Networkers
August 27, 2011 by admin
Filed under Lingerie Events
The percentage of adult Internet users using sites like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn is now 65 percent, up from 61 percent a year ago, according to a report released Friday by the Pew Research Center. Accounting for the percentage of adults who don’t use the Internet at all, that still means that half of all Americans now use social networking sites, Pew researchers said.
The number of Americans using such sites has exploded since 2005, when Pew found that just 8 percent of Internet users, or about 5 percent of all adult Americans, said they did. The percentage of Internet users saying they use social networking sites has more than doubled since 2008, when 29 percent of respondents said they were using them, according to the Pew survey.
Pew reported that women aged 18 to 29 are the most voracious users of social networking sites, with 89 percent of Internet users in that group participating in such sites and 69 percent of them reporting that they do so daily. Accounting for all age groups, 69 percent of adult women using the Internet said they’re social networkers as compared with 60 percent of men.
That’s been the case since at least 2008, the first year that Pew found that more women than men were using social networking sites.
Factoring in both genders, the youngest demographic still remains the most likely to frequent social networking sites, with 83 percent of online Americans aged 18 to 29 saying they visit them. Seniors who use the Internet are the least likely to log into Facebook and similar sitesjust 33 percent of those over 65 said they do so.
While Boomer-aged Internet users trailed those younger as social networking junkies, Pew did find that online adults aged 50 to 64 reported the biggest growth in daily use of social networking sites since last year’s survey, with 32 percent now saying they do so as compared with just 20 percent a year ago.
Overall, 43 percent of adult Americans who use the Internet go to social networking sites daily, meaning that the only other online activities Internet users do more are email, which 61 percent said they do daily, and search, which 59 percent reported doing daily. About 38 percent of online Americans said they were daily frequenters of social networking sites in last year’s poll, according to Pew, while just 13 percent were in 2008.
To put some more perspective on the staggering growth of social networking, Pew noted that in 2009, 46 percent of American Internet users said they’d been to a social networking site at least once in their lives, a percentage that was being fast approached in the latest poll by those who said they used those sites at least once on typical day.
The report also stated that researchers found “no significant differences in use of social networking sites based on race and ethnicity, household income, education level, or whether the internet user lives in an urban, suburban, or rural environment.”
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