What Social Media Users Want {STATS}

Posted: 18 Mar 2010 11:19 AM PDT

Twitterers mostly consume news, MySpace users want games and entertainment, Facebookers are into both news and community and Digg's audience has a mixed bag of interests.

This is all according to online advertising network Chitika, who set out to analyze the interests of MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and Digg users by comparing the genres of sites that receive traffic from these social networks. 287,090 impressions were used in the report, and based on this research, each social site has a distinct makeup of users with unique tastes.

The graphic below breaks it down. What's most interesting is that nearly half the traffic (47%) that Twitter generates falls into the news category. In fact, Twitter users' interest in the news genre surpasses that of Facebookusers by nearly 20%, which would appear to make it the number-one social network for newsies.

Another interesting tidbit is that MySpace users have no interest in news whatsoever. Instead that corner of the web splits its interests between video games (28%) and celebrity and entertainment content (23%). This aligns with what we've seen in terms of MySpace's business strategy around securing exclusive entertainment content over the past few months and where it's likely headed for the future.

If anything this data points to the varied interests behind our current obsession with popular social networks. It's important information for marketers, advertisers and brands hoping to appropriately leverage each site.