Neworld, Great relationships build great brands

A decided to have a quick look back at a post from last September. The post looked at how old the average Irish Facebook user was – at the time coming in at 29.6 years of age.

Stats from last year also look at the average age of American social networkers;

• The average Linked In user is 44 years of age
• The average Facebook user is 38 and 61% are over 35 years of age
• The average Twitter user is 39, with 65% of users aged over 35

It’s interesting to note all of the major social network sites then indicated that the average user was pushing 40. In fact if those figures stayed in and around the same it’s only the average Facebooker clinging onto their 30’s.

User Demographics Ireland

Here’s how the different age brackets in Ireland breakdown according to SocialBakers.com

In the last 12 months Facebook in Ireland has continued to grow considerably, from 1.73 million users at the end of summer 2010 to over 2 million today. To kind of put that growth into perspective Facebook almost grew a Twitter during that time. Okay, not exactly a Twitter since those stats are a few months old at this stage, and Twitter has grown again, but it’s still significant.

Using Facebook’s self serve ad’s creator I crunched some numbers to see if this growth has had any impact on the age of the average Irish user. Facebook growth will reach a plateau at some stage in the near future. In December 2010 84% of Ireland’s online population used a social network. Plus there’s over 2 million Irish Facebook profiles, and in May Comscore estimated Ireland’s online population stood at just over 2 million. But not everyone could be on Facebook, there’s a certain amount of duplicate profiles and perhaps not everyone went online in May.  Although the latter is hard to believe.

After crunching numbers it would seem we are all growing old on Facebook together, a year later and the average Facebook user is also one year older at 30.5 years of age. What those numbers hide is the amount of underage (ie. under 13 years) on the network who lie about their age to join. Some recent Irish research points out that 49% of 9 -12 year olds have lied about their age to join a social network. Also what’s missing is ages 65 and over with only one age bracket for those 64+. So the assumption is these two undisclosed groups balance each other out.

Taking the figures on face value it would indicate no major skew towards an older age group as seen in the USA. Irish Facebook-ers are still considerably younger than our American counterparts. So we’re one year older, now to test if we’re any wiser.