For some reason or other, I had always regarded what has come to be known as “social networking”, as being more about teenagers embarrassing themselves to each other than the middle aged doing their middle aged (and probably equally embarrassing) stuff.

And yet… and yet research by at least one organisation, Pingdom, seems to show that the truth is a little different. For most social networking sites, the average user age turns out to be closer to 40 than to 20. In their own words “social media isn’t dominated by the youngest, often most tech-savvy generations, but rather by what has to be referred to as middle-aged people (although at the younger end of that spectrum)” or, to be exact, exactly 37 years old.

Looking at the results of the Pingdom survey in greater detail, four websites, classmates.com, LinkedIn.com, Delicious.com and Slashdot.org have average users older than 40. The, relatively speaking, geriatric ward, is “classmates” which, of course, seeks to reunite long lost former classmates and has an average user age of almost 45.

Speaking of Slashdot.com, “news for nerds”… Its nerd/geek credentials truly are beyond reproach, as witnessed by the recent message: “Magicjack lost a lawsuit against Boing Boing when the judge declared the legal action a SLAPP”.

At the other end, Bebo has the lowest average age of users, just 28 years and the highest number of female users, nearly 70% followed by myspace and classmates.com.

Closer to home for us here at webcom, Facebook users are a respectable 38, while Twitter‘s an even more respectable 39 (on an aside, the site processed more than a billion tweets for the first time in December). On the whole, Pingdom found that most social networkers are 35 to 44 years old and, by a modest margin mostly women. Indeed, over the 19 sites used in Pingdom’s research women represent 53% of users and men 47%.

Indeed, the over 35 age group represents about 57% of all social media users, while the under 25s just 24%, most of them in the under 18 age range. With only 9% doing the social media thing, the 18 to 24s, the age band most people probably refer to as the “young” when it comes to treating them as a target group for activities like voting or even shopping, are one of the two most under represented groups in social media. They only beat the over 65s who log in last at 3%.

Obviously, what is missing from this is depth of time: what would returning to the survey in say 5 or ten years show? Will it be greater penetration of the truly young or a continuously ageing customer base for a media that is habitually described as crucial for reaching out to the… young?

So the question is there. Despite everything people tend to believe, are the “social media” a middle age affair?

Discuss…

PS. In case you are still wondering, SLAPP means Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. What that means is not for me to answer…