Social Networking Statistics
Most Active Social Networking States
We've ranked the states by how actively they appear to be embracing social networking. Which states are the most social states in the United States? If you think California is #1, think again.
Just for grins, I decided to look at which states are the most socially active in the US.
By socially active, I'm talking about social in the digital sense.
So, which states in the United States have fully embraced online social networking and social marketing? Which states are laggards in becoming active with social networking sites?
Since Twitter is quite popular, I decided to use Twitter as the base metric for the analysis.
Without a doubt, my methodology is flawed. To get the numbers used for the analysis, I just did a simple Twitter search on, for example, "location: California" in Twitter.
That search won't find people who typed in, say, "San Francisco" as their location, and there may be some other issues with the approach. But since we are using the same technique for every state, the assumption, right or wrong, is that this technique is still getting the right state rankings on a relative basis.
If there's a better way to do this analysis, let me know.
Here, in decreasing order are the states with the most active Twitter populations per capita. If you want the data that generated this list, we are happy to send it over to you.
Most Social States in the United States of America
(ranked by per capita use of social networking sites)
1. Washington DC
2. Washington
3. Maine
4. Oregon
5. Hawaii
6. Kansas
7. Alaska
8. Vermont
9. Colorado
10. New York
11. Utah
12. Iowa
13. Idaho
14. Ohio
15. Delaware
16. New Hampshire
17. Virgina
18. Oklahoma
19. Michigan
20. Texas
21. Florida
22. Rhode Island
23. Minnesota
24. Arizona
25. Guam
26. Indiana
27. Montana
28. Wyoming
29. California
30. Maryland
31. Nebraska
32. New Jersey
33. Wisconsin
34. Arkansas
35. Connecticut
36. Alabama
37. Massachusetts
38. Georgia
39. Nevada
40. Kentucky
41. New Mexico
42. Missouri
43. Tennessee
44. South Dakota
45. North Carolina
46. South Carolina
47. North Dakota
48. Louisiana
49. Illinois
50. West Virginia
51. Mississippi
52. Pennsylvania
53. Puerto Rico
54. US Virgin Islands
55. American Samoa
56. Northern Mariana Islands
FaceBook and MySpace Usage by City
Here's another way of looking at social networking adoption rates by geography. This data was provided by comScore. It shows penetration of visitors to individual sites from a given DMA (as opposed to States). The data is from May 2008.
From this comScore data, you can make conclusions like "Folks from New Orleans are more active on MySpace than folks from San Antonio" or "Milwaukee's Facebook users are much more active than Chicago's Facebook users."
It's a different slice on the same questions: Which locations are embracing social media and social networking sites at the fastest rate? Which locations are not jumping on the social networking bandwagon?
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If I have time, I will rework this analysis. I don't claim to be an analyst at Forrester or Gartner, so I'll leave it up with all its warts for now. Maybe it will encourage somebody else to do a proper analysis, in which case my work (all 35 minutes of it) will have a positive outcome.