Big shocker: It’s not the 7 percent of American adults who still refuse to use a mobile phone.

Most American adults now do own cell phones — and it seems sometimes that most kids do too. But for the purposes of mobile marketers, Forrester analyst Melissa Parrish segmented adult American phone owners into five categories:

1. Talkers
   Forget these … they only use their phones as — yikes — phones. Twenty-five percent of American adults, only use their phones to talk.
2. Communicators
   Communicators, who make up another 16 percent of American adults, are a little more adventurous than Talkers. They use newfangled technology like SMS to text each other in addition to talking on their phones.
3. Connectors
   Connectors step it up another notch — but only for work. They talk, text, and use “advanced services” like apps at least once a month, but these Jacks and Jills are dull boys and girls, focused almost entirely on their careers. Can we just say right now that these are BlackBerry owners?
4. Entertainers
   Parrish classifies the second biggest chunk of American adults as “entertainers.” A better description might be “entertained.” This 38 percent of adults in the country use their phones to talk and text, but also to listen to music, watch videos, and play games. Neil Postman would be like, terribly amused.
5. SuperConnecteds
   The biggest chunk of all have both feet firmly planted in the modern world of smartphones and LTE, using apps to network, research, and buy products, check the news and weather, and manage their bank accounts. It’s just even conceivable that they might actually talk on their phones once or twice a day.

(There is some overlap between categories — “for example, SuperConnecteds may also play games at least weekly, and thus also qualify as Entertainers,” Forrester’s Lara Cole explains — which is why the percentages don’t add up to 100.)

According to Parrish, just because 93 percent of Americans own mobile phones, that doesn’t mean they are all valid targets for mobile marketing activities. In fact, quite the opposite. Only the SuperConnecteds — 48 percent of Americans — are the consumers you want to reach.

“These are the users you can engage through innovative and advanced mobile marketing programs,” Parrish says in the report.

Also in the report: how to start mobile marketing, methods of strategic planning, and using an addressability framework (a way of conceptualizing customers based on context, needs, and technology).

photo credit: DavidErickson via photopin cc

A recent Piper Jaffray survey of 7000 U.S. teens ranked Facebook first in importance to teens. Twitter came in second, and Instagram — owned, of course, by Facebook — came in third. Detailed results, including how big the differences are, were not released, but Gene Munster, a Piper Jaffray analyst, said that Facebook is well positioned to stay top dog in social networks for teens.

That, however, contrasts with a mammoth social media demographics study completed by Pingdom just two months ago.

In that survey, which analyzed social media use at 24 different social networks, the average age of Facebook users is 40.5 years, while the average age of Twitter users is slightly younger, at 37.2. And when Pingdom compared the results to a previous study, the website performance monitoring company found that while the average age of Facebookers has increased by two years since 2010, the average of Twitter users has decreased by the same amount.

All of which correlates well with statistics way back from 2009 which showed Facebook users aging and Twitter users growing younger.

Source: Beevolve

Self-disclosed ages on Twitter

And it matches up with Beevolve’s recent survey of a whopping 36 million Twitter users. In Beevolve’s study, almost three quarters of users who disclose their age on Twitter are aged 15 to 25. That needs to be taken with a big fat grain of salt, as most of Twitter’s 500+ million users don’t disclose their age on the site, but is still an interesting indicator of a sizable youth contingent on Twitter.

A possible explanation?

Facebook has more than double Twitter’s users. At over a billion daily active users to Twitter’s perhaps 550 to 600 million total users, there’s a massive size advantage. Take into account the percentage of monthly active users out of Twitter’s total userbase — about a third — and the difference becomes even more apparent.

Daily active Facebook to Twitter users is probably about a five to one ratio … a billion to maybe 200 million. And that’s even before you take Instagram into account.

Which means that even if the average age of Twitter users is young, and perhaps on a percentage basis Twitter has more teens than Facebook, Facebook still easily has Twitter beat.

But that may yet change in the future, if the current demographic trends on social network continue.

photo credit: ruurmo via photopin cc

Performance monitoring service Pingdom has done another one of its mammoth social media studies, this one on the demographics of social media sites – every site imaginable, one would think, except for Google+. (Because Google+ is not directly monetized yet, the service does not appear in DoubleClick Ad Planner, the tool Pingdom uses to gather the data.)

The average ages of social media users holds no surprises … more than half are between 25 and 44 years old, with only 5 percent under 17 and only 1 percent over 65. The absolute average across all social networks is 36.9 percent.

More interesting is Pingdom’s graph showing the distribution of people across all the surveyed networks, showing that deviantART is the youngest social network and LinkedIn is the oldest:

Source: Pingdom

Age distribution across social networks

Interestingly, Google’s Orkut — big in Brazil — stands out as the social network with the largest chunk of its users in the 35-44 demographic.

(Which, if the data is correct, shows why Orkut is starting to falter: very few users in the younger, more dynamic segments. But I have my doubts on this one, since all of Pingdom’s data is U.S.-based, and Orkut is not big Stateside.)

Another interesting stat, this on on gender: 71 percent of the sites Pingdom checked are dominated by women.

The geek and propellerhead sites Slashdot, Hacker News, Stack Overflow, and Github buck this trend, being the sausagefests of the social networking world. Between 70 percent and 90 percent of their communities are male. Quora and Orkut are also male-dominated, as is Reddit.

It’s no shock that Pinterest is female-dominated, with a 79 percent ratio. Reading social network Goodreads is also heavily female, and then there are a lot of other sites that are in the 50 percent to 60 percent range: Tumblr, Tagged, Yelp, and Flickr.

Both of today’s social networking heavyweight champions, Twitter and Facebook, fall into this category.

Source: Pingdom

Distribution of men versus women across social network

The biggest question in my mind: Where are all the men?

Probably fishing — and not tweeting about it.

photo credit: solidether via photo pin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Price, brand, and apps are the three words you need to keep in mind if you are trying to sell tablets.

So says analytics firm comScore, which just published the first set of results from TabLens, its new insights service focused on tablet users. TabLens looked at 6,000 U.S. tablet users over a three-month span to get its numbers, and while most of the results are interesting, few of them are particularly groundbreaking.

The study found, for instance, that iPad owners tend to be wealthy young males, while most Kindle Fire users are female. For most of these Kindle Fire owners, price was the primary consideration in their purchases, which, again, isn’t a surprise: At $200, the Kindle Fire is far cheaper than the $500 iPad, so price is clearly going to be a major buying factor.

iPad owners, on the other hand, were more concerned with app selection, which had the largest impact on their purchases. Second to that was the tablet’s brand, which clearly carries a lot of weight for Apple products in general.

So why did comScore put the Kindle Fire in its own category rather than under the Android umbrella? Apparently, it was trying to show off what its TabLens service can do.

“We did that to show further audience granularity for this specific analysis,” comScore marketing manager Sarah Radwanick told VentureBeat by email. “TabLens allows for filtering so clients have the ability to look at multiple cuts of data – i.e. ‘All Android tablets’, ‘Android excluding Kindle Fire’, ‘Android tablets by OEM’, etc.”

comScore says that one of the more surprising findings was that tablet users didn’t seem too concerned with having their tablets and smartphones run the same operating system. This, the company says, is good news for Microsoft, which could still see success with its Surface tablet even though Windows Phone still isn’t doing so hot.

comScore also says that TabLens data can be used by groups as diverse as advertisers, manufacturers, network operators, and publishers. The company offers a similar service, MobiLens, to track usage habits among smartphone users.

Image:  Dmitriy Shironosov/Shutterstock 

If you found that 60 to 80 percent of your customers belonged to a particular demographic, you’d probably retarget your marketing and product development efforts to focus on that market.

Yet many internet companies are failing to do just that.

The population in question is the growing slice of the American population 50 years old and up. According to Steve Jurvetson, a managing director at venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Jody Holtzman, a senior vice president at AARP, many digital companies are doing nothing to accommodate older consumers. The two spoke in a panel discussion today at DEMO Spring 2012 in Santa Clara, Calif., an event co-produced by VentureBeat.

According to Jurvetson, people in this demographic:

• consume 60 percent of all consumer goods,
• consume 80 percent of all leisure travel, and
• shop online 3X as much as 18-34 year olds.

“Demographics is destiny. This is going to shift markets all over the world,” Jurvetson said.

Additionally, the total annual consumer spending by baby boomers is $2.5 trillion, with $1 trillion of that spent by those 65 and up, Holtzman said. By comparison, people in Generation Y spend only $800 billion per year.

“You go onto Expedia, or Travelocity, you wouldn’t know that 80 percent of leisure travel buyers are 50+ from looking at those sites. It’s like they don’t know who their customers are,” Holtman said. For example, fonts are small and difficult to read with older eyes, and there’s no option to make the type size larger.

Travel sites aren’t the only unwitting beneficiaries of an older user demographic. For example, in the popular PC multiplayer game Wizard 101, which is aimed at 7-12 year olds, it turns out that many players are quite a bit older.

“The amount of intergenerational play between kids and their parents and grandparents is a huge part of the game,” Holtzman said.

Similarly, startup LegalZoom, which provides legal documents, has found that many of its customers are 50 or older.

In the end, designing for the broadest possible demographic just makes sense, because it opens you to the largest market.

“It’s an opportunity for making sure that you maximize your market,” Holtzman said. “When you build something that a 5-year-old or an 85-year-old can use, like an iPad, you’re maximizing your market opportunity.”

[Update: Jurveston has just posted some more thoughts on this, including the observation that children hit their peak at 2 to 3 years old, with 10x the synapses and 2x the energy burn of an adult brain, but that adults can slow their decline through mental exercise.]

Photo: Matt Marshall of VentureBeat, Steve Jurvetson, and Jody Holtzman (L-R). Photo credit: Heather Kelly/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

While only 4 percent of US online adults have ever used a location-based service, like popular check in app Foursquare, data from research firm Forrester shows that young adult males with college degrees appear to be the main user group.

In addition to being the main user group, the group may also be heavy online influencers as 38% of them claim that their networks ask them for their opinion before making a purchase decision. It would be interesting to know what types of products their networks ask them about before a purchase. Most likely, it’s probably electronics.

Finally, the data shows that the group may also be heavy mobile researchers, meaning that they are more likely to search for information on products or services as well as look up ratings and reviews. If the user group is constantly checking in to locations, then they are probably also using their smartphones for the following.

The nifty graph below spotlights more specifics location-based service users to US online adult users.