With the internet being such an expansive and accessible tool worldwide, sometimes it can be hard to tell just who it is you are reaching out to when using social media. As a brand or individually as a PR professional, it's handy to know who is most likely to be at the receiving end of any digital campaign efforts, or even just your latest status update. Over at Pingdom they've collated a bunch of rather interesting stats showing the typical demographics for some of the most popular social networking sites around. Unfortunately there are no results for  Google+ as the tool used (DoubleClick Ad Planner) contains no data for it. Also, the demographics data used in this survey is for the United States, however it's still very insightful.

According to the research, across the span of all social media included,  the typical ages of those using such sites  fall into the 25-34 years (26 per cent) and 35-44 years (25 per cent) categories.

However when looking more in depth, these averages turn much more specific depending on which website is being considered.

As you can see from the graph above, every networking hub varies. It disparages the rumour that social media is just for the more youthful of internet users. For example, 79 per cent of LinkedIn users are 35 or older, as are 65 per cent of Facebook users and63 per cent of Pinterest users .

Of course there is the other side of the coin which shows some sites to have very strong and defined demographics, which is very usefull for those targeting a certain age range of online consumers.

It would seem that across the entire span of these social media site, the average age of a user is 36.9 years old. Individually, this average age differs per site. And finally, we see that  if your target market is gender specific you should really be focussing on certain site. For example, nearly 80 per cent of Pinterest user are female. This is a stark contrast to Slashdot where the percentage of female members is less than 15. All things considered, these statistice prove that you really do need to think before you click.