Social networking sites serve very different needs, audiences

For a lot of chief marketing officers and vice presidents of marketing, figure out social media and social networking sites is challenging enough. But for those willing to put a toe in the water, knowing where to put that toe based on good data is challenging, too.

Business Week is reporting now on data from comScore, which shows a tremendous amount of important statistics on two of the big social networking sites, including:

• Traffic counts put MySpace way in the lead
  • 68 million users on MySpace last month
  • 26 million users on Facebook last month
• MySpace has an older demographic
  • 50% of MySpace users are over age 35, while only 17% are 18-24
  • 40% of Facebook users are over age 35, while 29% are college students
• Facebook attracts a significantly wealthier demographic
• They are not mutually exclusive audiences. In fact, there’s a 64% overlap between the two sites.

This sort of data are becoming increasingly important as advertisers start to shift more media dollars to social media sites. Google alone paid $900 million to advertise on MySpace.

More to come…