Royal Pingdom, the people who the other month produced a chart showing how social media is female dominated, has released another study.   This time they looked at the age distribution across social network sites in the US. (Via Matthew Gain)

In line with other studies over the past eighteen months, it shows that social media is the preserve of Web users aged 25+ with 62% being aged 25-54 and only 9% being 18-24.    In terms of age distribution across the various sites, it’s perhaps no surprise that LinkedIn had a reasonably older profile at one end of the scale and Bebo (a brand you don’t hear people talking about a lot anymore) had 40%+ of its audience aged under 17.

Royal Pingdom lists Twitter’s average age as 39, and as always for every stat it’s possible to produce another one that can give you a slightly different interpretation.   So the other week Silicon Alley Insider produced this chart from Comscore showing that the under 24s now account for 30% of Twitter users, up from 20% at the end of 2008.

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This is a short post for the forthcoming Cow Digital digest, which Louise Doherty and myself put together every week.  Sign up for it here!

According to Google, the fastest growing search terms for 2009 so far have been Michael Jackson, Facebook and Tuenti, the latter being a leading Spanish social network.   Meanwhile the top three searches for Microsoft’s search engine ‘Bing’, are likewise Michael Jackson and Facebook, with Swine Flu in third place.

Perhaps of more interest is Google’s list of fast falling searches.  Barack Obama, Amy Winehouse and Heath Ledger all figure.  

So, perhaps worryingly for the brands in question do video sharing site Daily Motion, social network Bebo and Nintendo’s game console, the wii.

Over the past two years there’s been a raft of research showing that women are increasingly more active than men in social media…for example last year there was the Rapleaf study showing that women tended to have more social network friends than men.

Another piece of research by Royal Pingdom confirms the trend.  It shows that most of the networks that could be considered to be ‘social’ in the real sense of the word – Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Bebo have a user base that’s 50%+ female.  Networks that are arguably much more functional in the sense that you save or tag articles – Reddit and Digg by comparison have more of a male bias.

The chart below shows more detail.   All in all, 53% of users across the 19 sites were female and 47% were male.

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