U.S. Teens Like Social Networking
New numbers from the Pew Internet & American Life Project confirm the obvious: teenagers in the U.S. love their social networking sites. And, as expected, MySpace is the overwhelmingly favored site for teens when it comes to networking with friends on the Internet.
Of all U.S. teen Web users (defined as youths between the ages of 12 and 17), 55% visit social networking sites, while 45% do not.
A tremendous majority of U.S. teens, or 85% of them to be exact, indicated that they update their MySpace pages most often. Facebook was a very, very distant second with 7%, while Xanga took a 1% share of the responses. Two percent of respondents didn’t “know/refused,” and another 5% said “Other.” This question was open-ended, and YouTube and Bebo received some responses.
Teens also use these sites frequently, with 48% of them indicating that they visit these social networking sites at least once a day.
Females (58%) create social networking profiles online more frequently than males (51%). Also, 64% of teens between the ages of 15-17 create profiles, while 45% of teens between the ages of 12-14 do the same.
Seventy percent of females between the ages of 15-17 are most likely to have created a social networking profile online.
A nice figure was that 66% of teens who have a social networking profile online limit access to their information.
Most teens, or 72% of them, say that they use social networking sites to plan things with their friends, while 49% of them say that they use these Web sites to make new friends. Older boys (15-17) are more likely to make new friends on these sites than girls of the same age group (60% vs. 46%).
Only 17% of teens who use social networking sites say that they flirt through these online venues, with 29% of older boys indicating so, compared to only 13% of girls in the same age group.
Sources:
http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_SNS_Data_Memo_Jan_2007.pdf
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1004444
