I’ve had several church pastors, communications directors and media staff ask me for some kind of statistical data to help them (and their church leadership) understand the impact, growth & importance of social networking in our culture (specifically, the United States). I continue to find bits and pieces of data in stories and news items, but today I found some very interesting information which provides a bunch of highly useful data for explaining the fast adoption rate of social networking.

The following data comes from an article by the Center for Media Research (at Mediapost.com). You can subscribe to their daily newsletters for free if you are also interested in this kind of data.

A Netpop study found that social networking has grown 93% since 2006 and 76% of US broadband users (105 million) are active contributors to the web via social media. In addition, approximately 29%, or 40 million broadband users, are regular contributors to the web specifically through social networking sites and are spending increasing amounts of their online time communicating with each other, both one-to-one and one-to-many.

In looking at the social network landscape, Netpop offers these Key findings about US social networkers:

• Social networkers in the US are most likely to be single, employed women, age 18-39 and living somewhere between Indiana and the Atlantic Ocean, or along the west coast.
• A typical social networker connects weekly with an average of 18 people one-to-one, and 110 people one-to-many.
• Social networkers spend an average of 36% of their online time talking and sharing.
• Social networkers use multiple modes to communicate and stay in touch. These include IM (Instant Messages), texts, blogs and microblogs (such as Twitter).

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