Who’s the multicultural winner among the social media sites – MySpace or Facebook?

Right in the middle of brainstorming keyword lists for 2 multilingual PPC-campaigns in 6 different languages for the Swedish market (yes, people, ethnic groups do use their home language for search, not just the host country language) I found this great post on multicultural usage of social media from the always interesting Hispanic Online Marketing.
Wanted to know more on multicultural group’s usage of social media such as Facebook and MySpace?
From a national (US) sample of 2500 people with closer to 500 cases in each group Florida State University and DMS Research worked on producing interesting facts on social media usage among the following ethnic groups:

- Hispanics who prefer English
- Hispanics who prefer Spanish
- Non-Hispanic Whites
- African Americans
- Asian Americans

The results show broad differences between the various groups and also that certain groups visit social media and networking sites more than others.
“English Preferring Hispanics” is the group that visit social networking sites the most – 36% said they visit at least 2 or 3 times a month. On the other end we have “Non-Hispanic Whites” with just over 18% visiting this much.

Now comes the juicy stuff: When comparing MySpace and Facebook usage, A) MySpace was by far the most frequented and B) “English Preferring Hispanics” for MySpace and “Asian Americans” for Facebook were the two top groups visiting regularly. The often-discussed gap between Hispanics who prefer to speak English vs the Hispanics who prefer Spanish is there but it’s not so big as certain studies have predicted.
44% of “English Preferring Hispanics” and 35% of “Spanish Preferring Hispanics” are on MySpace, which I don’t see as a huge difference. It’s also interesting to see that the “Asian American” group, averaging higher academic degrees, follows the trend of using Facebook.

For those of you curious to see age differences and why the “Non-Hispanic White” group scored so low, go to the original post for more details.

Sources:
http://www.hispaniconlinemarketing.com/2009/02/the-multicultural-world-of-social-media-marketing/
http://hmc.comm.fsu.edu/
http://www.dms-research.com/

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