My daily consumption of infographics has abated somewhat this week as a direct result of having too much work to do. However, this one came through from Social Media Monthly today and it was a) interesting b) very easy to understand

In here are some obvious and less obvious revelations:

1. Orkut (what’s that?!) dominated by 25-34 year old (men) more than any other group dominates any other social network (except males on Slashdot, Hackenew and Stack Overflow)
2. Facebook is starting to lean old
3. More than half of the people on DeviantArt are below 24, and almost a quarter below 18. Which means there are a lot of really talented artists out there who will probably get good designer jobs pretty soon. 
4. Tagged? I thought all the emails i got from Tagged were pure spam. I had no idea there was actually a functioning social network there. 

There are some glaring omissions here like Pandora, Instagram and Tumblr and of course Google+ (although I have some issues with Google+ right now since more than half of the top 10 Google+ brand sites are …. Google products). 

What I see displayed here is the lifespan of a social network. Facebook started with 18-22 year olds in 2004. That audience is now 10 years older…28-32 years old, and older. That’s food for Facebook’s monetization strategy. But opens them up to risk in the future. Some other trendy social network can come along and attract people < 18 and all of a sudden Facebook becomes the uncool thing that grandma does. LinkedIn seems a bit long in the tooth with a really small number of 25-34 year olds, and even fewer 18-24 year olds. This sort of surprises me given the number of unemployed recent college graduates entering the job market. The relative numbers here don’t tell the whole story - like how much the younger demographic on LinkedIn has grown in the last 12 months. However, it does suggest that upstart jobs social network AfterCollege has a niche to work in and attract the younger segment. 

The data also show gender distribution across these social networks and interestingly not surprisingly woman tend to dominate online. Also it looks like either there aren’t enough female hackers or there is a real market for a female friendly hacker/code side. 

As it relates to politics, I think this shows that a truly effective online outreach strategy for a political or advocacy campaign needs to be fairly creative and fairly sophisticated. As campaigns start to understand their target online audience better and better through sophisticated data mining and audience insights applications, deploying advertising and engagement strategies to reach that audience cannot just focus on Facebook and Google and Twitter, and the strategies cannot be one size fits all.