Whether it’s from reading reports or scoping out the sites ourselves, most of us have a pretty good feel for various social networks – how big they are, who’s joined them, and so on. New statistics from Rapleaf don’t really shake things up, but they do provide some interesting insights.
It’s a sort of Facebook versus OpenSocial setup, and thanks to MySpace, OpenSocial’s side wins in terms of a user count; with 11.3 million, MySpace easily outdistances Facebook (with its 2.6 million), as well as its would-be pals hi5 (4.5 million), Friendster (2.3 million), Plaxo (1.3 million), and LinkedIn (0.8 million).
Facebook is ahead with younger users, however – as Richard MacManus notes, “52% of Facebook users are 18-25, whereas 40% of the users are 18-25 for the five container sites on the OpenSocial platform.” Now, the value of this is debatable – LinkedIn, for example, doesn’t really try to embrace the college crowd – yet from an advertiser’s standpoint, the stat makes Facebook look pretty interesting.
Also interesting (and not necessarily good) is the abundance of men on LinkedIn. On most other social networks, there’s something like a 60-40 split between women and men, but in LinkedIn’s case, that’s reversed.
One last note from RapLeaf’s report: Plaxo’s users are the most likely to belong to multiple other social networks, while MySpace’s users seem most content to only be in one or two.
