Just got my hands on the quite fas­ci­nat­ing “Social Techno­graph­ics” study from For­rester Research. They take a close look at the social and demo­graphic struc­ture of the social web pop­u­la­tion — unlike Technorati’s sta­tis­tics which mostly focus on raw blog growth num­bers and struc­tural fea­tures of the blo­gos­phere. The study is based on two sur­veys includ­ing includ­ing close to 5000 North-American indi­vid­u­als each.

Inter­est­ing facts:

22% of adults now read blogs at least monthly, and 19% are mem­bers of a social net­work­ing site. Even more amaz­ingly, almost one–third of all youth pub­lish a blog at least weekly, and 41% of youth visit a social net­work­ing site daily.

Based on an analy­sis of online par­tic­i­pa­tion and con­sump­tion prac­tices, the authors iden­tify six seg­ments of users, ordered by degree of participation:

Note that par­tic­i­pa­tion at one level may or may not over­lap with the par­tic­i­pa­tion at other lev­els — so the ratios sum up to over 100%. I am cit­ing with omis­sions from the study:

Cre­ators pub­lish blogs, main­tain Web pages, or upload videos to sites like YouTube at least once per month. Cre­ators include just 13% of the adult online pop­u­la­tion. Cre­ators are gen­er­ally young — the aver­age age of adult users is 39 — but are evenly split between men and women.

Crit­ics par­tic­i­pate in either of two ways — com­ment­ing on blogs or post­ing rat­ings and reviews on sites like Amazon.com. Crit­ics rep­re­sent 19% of all adult online con­sumers and on aver­age are sev­eral years older than Cre­ators. Two-thirds of them post rat­ings and reviews, but only 22% com­ment on blogs and rate/review Web site con­tent. Four out of 10 Crit­ics are Cre­ators as well.

Col­lec­tors cre­ate meta­data that’s shared with the entire com­mu­nity, e.g. by sav­ing URLs on a social book­mark­ing ser­vice like del.icio.us or using RSS feeds on Blog­lines. Col­lec­tors rep­re­sent 15% of the adult online pop­u­la­tion and are the most male-dominated of all the Social Techno­graph­ics groups. More than two-thirds tag pages, while more than half use RSS.

Join­ersuse a social net­work­ing site like MySpace.com or Face­book. Join­ers rep­re­sent only 19% of the adult online pop­u­la­tion and are the youngest of the Social echno­graph­ics groups. They are highly likely to engage in other Social Com­put­ing activ­i­ties — 56% also read blogs, while 30% pub­lish blogs.

Spec­ta­tors rep­re­sent 33% of the adult online pop­u­la­tion and are slightly more likely to be women and have the low­est house­hold income of all the social Techno­graph­ics groups. The most com­mon activ­ity for Spec­ta­tors is read­ing blogs, with only a small over­lap with users who watch peer-generated video on sites like YouTube. In all, 31% of Spec­ta­tors do not engage in Cre­ator, Critic, Col­lec­tor, or Joiner activities.

Inac­tives. Today, 52% of online adults do not par­tic­i­pate at all in social com­put­ing activ­i­ties. These Inac­tives have an aver­age age of 50, are more likely to be women, and are much less likely to con­sider them­selves lead­ers or tell their friends about prod­ucts that inter­est them.

Finally, the authors dis­cuss demo­graphic fea­tures with respect to the segments:

18 — 26 year olds have the high­est per­cent­ages in almost every par­tic­i­pat­ing cat­e­gory. What stands out is the extremely high par­tic­i­pa­tion in social net­work activ­i­ties (70% for 18–21 year olds!).

More sur­pris­ingly, one third of teenagers is also actively cre­at­ing con­tent, how­ever these are less engag­ing as Crit­ics or Col­lec­tors than other generations.

Gen­er­a­tion X is par­tic­i­pat­ing with up to 29% for Join­ers, but around 40% are merely Spec­ta­tors or Inac­tive. Older gen­er­a­tions tend to par­tic­i­pate less, but still have a Spec­ta­tor rate of almost one fifth for seniors, which is also more than I expected.

Over­all, an extremely inter­est­ing study. Aimed at mar­keters, it also has a lot to offer for design­ers: What tar­get groups are you design­ing for — and what incen­tives will you provide?

Most inter­est­ing to me was the pretty even seg­men­ta­tion — I expected an even more skewed dis­tri­b­u­tion with more peo­ple pas­sively con­sum­ing and only a small per­cent­age actively cre­at­ing. And good to see that the social web is pretty gen­der neu­tral — women even have a slightly higher ratio on social net­works activity.