SmallBusinessNewz

It's common sense that a small business specializing in wheelchair accessories shouldn't advertise outside the average daycare center.  However, it may be less obvious whether that business would be best off establishing a presence on Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter, and that's where new stats from Pingdom can help.

Pingdom analyzed the ages of visitors to 19 different sites - Bebo, Classmates.com, Delicious, Digg, Facebook, FriendFeed, Friendster, Hi5, Last.fm, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, MySpace, Ning, Reddit, Slashdot, StumbleUpon, Tagged, Twitter, and Xanga - and presented the information in several graphs.

To hit just a few highlights: the average age of a MySpace user is 31.8.  The average age of a Facebook user is 38.4.  The average age of a Twitter user is 39.1, and finally, the average age of a LinkedIn user is 44.3.

Hopefully this data (and what's included in the rest of Pingdom's report) will prove useful in terms of picking the right sites to start a social media campaign.  Just don't base any decisions on it alone, since socioeconomic factors should also be considered.

Also, business owners of course need to think about whether a company can even make its presence felt on all of these social networks, since not all of them allow (Last.fm, maybe StumbleUpon) for a lot of brand engagement.