Social media habits of people across Canada, the US and UK

On Wednesday I talked about a new study looking at the social media habits of people across Canada, the US and UK. The study was done by some of my friends over at Cossette. I’ve spend the last few days looking and trying to dig a bit deeper into the study, which isn’t surprising as a whole but does point out some interesting facts that I wasn’t aware of before reading this. I wasn’t shocked that 65% of people in Canada and 51% of people in the US are on Facebook, which is fine and has MySpace trailer at 11% and 36% respectively. However, when you look at the weekly usage and frequency is when you start to notice something different.

Canada: Weekly us: 61%/ Frequency: 21.1%
US: Weekly us: 56% / Frequency: 16.4%
UK: Weekly us: 54% / Frequency: 11.4%

Penetration may be high across the board for all three countries but the US is visiting sites like Facebook at a higher rate per week then Canada and the UK. This means if I’m looking to get more face time with a user then the US might be a better bet as they spend more time on social networks even if they have less people as a whole using social networks.  We still see users accessing social networks from different places such as their home (60%), work (25% among 25-34 year-old) and mobile phone (16% among 18-24 year-olds).

Now what people are doing on Facebook and other social networks or the Internet isn’t a big surprise. A lot of people are looking for product information or looking at news online. They take consumer written reviews (66%) and feel they are more valuable then top search result (52%) or company produced content (45%). However, the fact that 55% of user generated content is only 1% away from beating professional journalism at 56% is something that company’s and people in the public relation industry should take note of if they have not already. This has been a long time coming but it’s more of a reality as we enter 2010. The US is the most active in this space followed by the UK and then Canada isn’t a shock. The one area that the US and Canada are more alike is when adults 18-24 are talking about products/services and brands online.

The last part of the study continues the same trends of Canada having a high penetration rate but the US having a higher frequency rate when it comes to how they are spending their time using social networks and social media as a whole. Hopefully Cossette continues doing this case study on a yearly bases so we can start to track the trends from a historic point of view.

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