If you’re not leveraging the power of social media to boost sales, you could be missing a huge sales opportunity. As Heidi Klum used to say, “One day you're in, the next day you’re out.” Print ads are out. Connecting directly with your customer is in. So unless you want to sit on the sales sidelines while your competitors grab more of your prime customers, you'll need to expand your presence in social media.
Shifting Age Demographics
A new report notes that Twitter’s average user is a 37-year old female—two years younger than Twitter's average age in 2010. If you’re selling any type of product to women, that’s a prime demoraphic. If you’re selling to a different demographic, there’s a social network or online community that fits your needs. Research conducted by Pingdom, a website-monitoring service, studied the age and gender distribution of 24 of the most popular social networks—including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit and Tumblr. The results revealed a broad age range of potential customers most sales managers simply can’t ignore.
To begin with, over half of Twitter users are over the age of 35, just a few months older than the average of all users across the 24 networks in the Pingdom study. Did you know that the youngest users, mostly under the age of 24, were on the art network DeviantART? On the other side of the age spectrum lies LinkedIn, whose users were over the age of 55. Coming in a close second to LinkedIn in this age demo was Yelp, whose average user was just over 42 years old. Twitter users were typically younger than those on Facebook, which attracts 40 year-year-olds on average. In 2.5 years, Twitter’s average age has dropped by two; Facebook's average age has risen by two.
Gender Demographics Lean Female
Barring tech sites like Slashdot, which is 87 percent male, there are more female social media users than male. Of the 24 top social media sites, 17 are used more by females than males. Pingdom puts the average gender distribution at 48.75 percent male, 51.25 percent female. With its accent on clothing, style and cooking, the most female dominated site by far was, not surprisingly, Pinterest, with 79 percent active participation. Coming in a close second and third were Goodreads, with 70 percent women and Blogger, with 66 percent female.
Facebook and Twitter also lean female, with a 60/40 percent split. Reddit, on the other hand, is 60 percent male, with average users being the youngest in the Pingdom study—at 33.9 years of age.
Pingdom noted that, "To us, one big takeaway from this report is that there’s a place for everyone in today’s social media landscape. These sites have users that span the entire age spectrum, and there really are no limits to what you can achieve online, regardless of age or gender.”
As we near the holiday season, it’s going to be crunch time for sales managers. It’s important to steer your sales team toward social media. For today, you may be in; but tomorrow, you could be out.
Image by watcharakun / freedigitalphotos.net
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