The Pew Internet & American Life Project published a new report outlining the increased social networking usage by adults:
- Half of all adults (50%) use social networking sites.
- Two-thirds of adult internet users (65%) say they use a social networking site like MySpace, Facebook or LinkedIn.
- Among adult internet users, slightly more women (69%) than men (60%) use social networking sites.
- Only email (which 61% of internet users access on a typical day) and search engines (which 59% use on a typical day) are used more often than social networking tools.
- There are no major differences in social networking sites usage based on race and ethnicity, household income, education level, or an urban, suburban, or rural environments (as of May 2011).
The good news is that “positive responses far outweighed the negative and neutral words that were associated with social networking sites (more than half of the respondents used positive terms).” However, “negative responses were recorded for roughly one in five respondents who answered this question.” See the chart below:
With so many adults now online, there is no denying that the use social networking sites has become completely mainstream. It’s therefore more important than ever to teach people how to reap the best that the online environment has to offer, to successfully participate online, and what to do if they find themselves on the unfortunate end of unwarranted attacks.