Are Social Users Different?

Social Media users are becoming the stable bread and butter users of many blogs and professional link baiter’s but few people understand how diverse (or not) these groups are recently we have been putting our efforts into looking at not only how they interact with our sites but how social media users differ from “normal” traffic.

How these test were conducted

Tracking individuals is a bit of a pain but achievable even using tools such as Google Analytics (a blog post in itself hmm there is an idea!) however luckily we are able to separate users starting point simply based on their referral information. The statistics gathered here are collected from a sample of 1000 social users (Diggers and stumblers) from 3 sites (various niches arts& craft, computing, and poetry) over a period of a month an equal number was collected of “normal” users stats to make a fair comparison (for the point of these stats norm is a visitor arriving via search engines or a non social referring site.)

Yes the pie charts are blue, it fits in with the theme, if you are colour blind please accept my apologise I can of course send you the raw data for you to turn into the colour of your choice. Otherwise their blue live with it

Social users vs the “norms”

Browsers Interesting side note, FireFox 2 was technically the largest single version of any browser but this was more down to the fact that all its variants were counted as one version. While very few differences a couple of things to note, Social Media users on the whole were using the latest version of their browser available they also accounted for slightly more exotic browsers as well. We had during the study 2 Iphones User Agents identified both came from the social media side I will leave what this means for you if your interested both were referrals from Digg. Operating Systems Few things to note here, Social Media users again can be seen as early adopters also note the slight increase in Mac users. The highest number of Unix users came from Digg while more Vista users came through StumbleUpon then any other source. Interestingly we had a single non social media user come through via RISC-OS 5 which presumably means he is on an Iyonix which was nice to see. Overall Vista uptake was higher in Social Media users by just 0.3% at 6.8% with Windows XP still being the dominant force though down by also 0.3% an interesting direct correlation which should cheer Bill gates up a bit. Screen Resolution Screen Size comparison is probably one of the most useful stats, Both sets of stats show that their is still 14% of people using browser size of 800 by 600 or less. Looking at our historical trend the less then 800×600 figure is up from this time last year possibly due to the take up in hand held devices. The good news is 98% of all users had colour resolution greater then 256 its probably safe to be thinking outside of the web safe colour palette. Again Social media users are just edging ahead of main stream users in having larger screen resolution but by a very tiny margin. Flash & JavaScript No graphs for this one, both parties having over 90% Flash take up and 97% Javascript take up though the JavaScript enabled would appear to be down from the previous year by 0.3% this stat could be more to do with our JavaScript tracker being blocked as opposed to actual reduction. Disclaimer – 2000 users is a very small data set, use these stats as a guide not a concrete analysis. Previous years statistics did not differentiate between social media and normal users