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Social Media Demographics (click image to make large)

This image was on Digg and Delicious today and I wanted to check the data. It appears to be taken from a Blogger.com blog post, which in turn based its stats on a RapLeaf study from July 2008.

So, the data is a little old, but barring a major demographic shift on any network, the trends likely still hold.

It’s interesting, then, that MySpace and Facebook trend female, while Flickr is gender-balanced and LinkedIn is male-dominated. It’s something we often forget when reviewing social networks: a social network is defined as much by the people who frequent it as the features it provides.

What’s more, these demographics are likely self-reinforcing, I think: females are less likely to join male-dominated social news site Digg as its content skews towards male interests. This serves to compound the issue of gender imbalance. If a site like Digg wanted to become more gender balanced, then, what could they do?

There’s more social media stats in the Mashable article How to Find Statistics on Social Media