Do demographics affect popularity of socnets?

I thought of these the other day and was happy to hear that this had been brought up in discussion with Contagious Magazine at !magine 07. Deomgraphic trends vary hugely across the globe with some countries having an ageing population, some having a younger population, and some varying massively within these two demographics. I thought I would look at two interesting countries to see if there interesting demographics affected their use or uptake of social networking.

1) China and the one child per family ruling. The Chinese government have implemented a policy which means families are limited to having only one child per family (born into the family) between a 2006-2010 planning period. The first one child policy was established in 1979 by Deng Xiaoping to limit the communist growth of China. This rule has been estimated to have reduced the overall population growth in China by 300m in its first years. What this does mean is there that are going to be an awful lot of only children growing up in China, without the friendship of a brother or sister. This isn’t meant to be a sob story more of a noticing of a massive growth business opportunity to create social networks of sole children, so they can learn how to interact with other children at an early age and build relationships.

The idea here has already been tagged onto by Intel who recently (May 2007) invested in China’s social networking site 51.com. They clearly see the potential for more growth here and the figures in China are staggering. China has 137million internet users , with 51.com taking over 1/3 of these users in its database (60mn registered users). The 137million internet users only represents an internet penetration of around 10% in China so the opportunity to grow social networks is massive. Imagine a socially connected country spanning the different regions of China linking all these only children and giving them virtual experiences which they would never be allowed normally. (Chinese government ruling aside)

2) An Ageing European Population. In most countries in Europe, especially in Italy and the UK, the population is becoming rapidly older. This is due to women working later before having children, couples not having children at all, women and men no marrying until later, and has led to a drop in babies per woman to 1.5. (This should normally be 2.1) I myself would like to have a big family, 4 children hopefully, so I am prepared to do my bit for bringing down the population. However, as a marketeer I see an opportunity here which hasn’t yet been capitalised on.

What about a MySpace for the older generation? Somewhere where older couples, men, women can enjoy themselves freely on the net and not worry about the younger generation interupting their educated conversations about classical music for example. The brashness of MySpace and the exponential growth and poking of Facebook, clearly puts an older demographic off. And although this report from Mashable suggests different, I would think that the active user base of MySpace is a young 18-25. What we need therefore is a simplified way of using the site where the older audience (we are talking 50+, high income, babyboomers) can learn about developing their own site whilst connecting to new friends.

Matt Bamford-Bowes