Q: Are older social media users as influential online as their younger counterparts?

We’ve put numbers to a few instinctual responses in the age versus social media debate. Today we want to add another insight to this list: influence. Outside of social media, it’s often thought that influence increases with age. But does that carry over into the social media movement? Let’s take a look.

The Goods
We aggregated data from 10 mountain resorts for over 55,000 guests whose age and Klout score were both known. From there we grouped and averaged scores by age and plotted it on the chart below where age is on the x-axis and average Klout Score (1-100) for each age is on the y-axis:

Right off the bat we see a nearly identical trend to social activity based on age. After a dip in the mid 20’s, social media influence steadily declines. While we’re not sure what causes the dip early on, it may be an indicator of high schoolers leaving their teenager-centric groups, where their influence may only be measured against each other.

What This Means
As far as we can tell, the reach and social influence online appears to bear little resemblance to what may be happening offline. Keep in mind, however, that because social media is so young, this is a point-in-time analysis of different users’ influence at different ages, not an analysis of the same users’ influence throughout their life.

The big takeaway we see is that successful word-of-mouth marketing online may require (and ultimately reach) a very different demographic thanoffline. The online world appears to be is influenced by the same people who use it the most – the younger crowd.

Giddy Up
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