Do you know how old the average Twitter or Facebook user is? Do you know what share of Reddit’s users are women? We could go on and on; when it comes to social network demographics, the questions are endless. This research is going to answer those questions for you, showing you the age and gender distribution on 24 of today’s most popular social networks and online communities.

Average age distribution

If you average the age distribution across all the sites in the survey, this here below is what you end up with. You could think of it as the age distribution in the social media sphere.

Age distribution per site

When it comes age distibution among social media networkds, the youngest site is at the top.

This chart should make something very clear; social media is most definitely not just for the young. Some examples:

55% of Twitter users are 35 or older.
63% of Pinterest users are 35 or older.
65% of Facebook users are 35 or older.
79% of LinkedIn users are 35 or older.

Average user age per site

Based on the sites in this survey, the estimated age of the average social media user is just under 37 years old. Here are some other observations:

The oldest users: LinkedIn has the oldest user base, with the average user being 44.2 years old.

The average Facebook user is 40.5 years old.

The average Twitter user is 37.3 years old.

The age trend for Facebook and Twitter. Compared to a previous survey which was conducted 2.5 years ago, the age of the average Facebook user has gone up two years, while the age of the average Twitter user has gone down two years. In other words, Twitter’s user base is getting younger, while Facebook’s is getting older.

What about gender?

Based on the United States demographics data (from Ad Planner) there is a clear gender imbalance on many of these sites. Some are much more male dominated, and vice versa. However, when you look at all the data together, it becomes clear that women rule social media. More than two thirds of the sites in this survey have more female than male users.

17 out of 24 sites (71%) have more female than male users.

The average gender distribution is 48.75% male, 51.25% female.

Most male-dominated site? Slashdot (87% males) is the standout, followed by Hacker News (77% males) and Stack Overflow (76% males). In general, the more tech-focused sites in this survey have more male users than female.
Most female-dominated site? Pinterest (79% females) is in a league of its own, followed by Goodreads (70% females) and Blogger (66% females).

Facebook and Twitter have the same gender distribution: 40% male, 60% female.