Most Active Social Networking States in US
July 29th, 2008 by Ken Gaebler
We’ve ranked the states by how actively they appear to be embracing social networking. Which states are the most social states in the United States? The analysis is admittedly imperfect, but I haven’t seen anything else out there so I took a crack at it. Results are a bit surprising. If you think California is #1, think again.
Just for grins, I decided to look at which states are the most socially active in the US.
By socially active, I’m talking about social in the digital sense.
So, which states in the United States have fully embraced online social networking and social marketing? Which states are laggards in becoming active with social networking sites?
Since Twitter is quite popular, I decided to use Twitter as the base metric for the analysis.
Without a doubt, my methodology is flawed. To get the numbers used for the analysis, I just did a simple Twitter search on, for example, “location: California” in Twitter.
That search won’t find people who typed in, say, “San Francisco” as their location, and there may be some other issues with the approach. But since we are using the same technique for every state, the assumption, right or wrong, is that this technique is still getting the right state rankings on a relative basis.
If there’s a better way to do this analysis, let me know. Here, in decreasing order are the states with the most active Twitter populations per capita. If you want the data that generated this list, we are happy to send it over to you.
Most Social States in the United States of America (ranked by per capita use of social networking sites) :
- Washington DC
- Washington
- Maine
- Oregon
- Hawaii
- Kansas
- Alaska
- Vermont
- Colorado
- New York
- Utah
- Iowa
- Idaho
- Ohio
- Delaware
- New Hampshire
- Virgina
- Oklahoma
- Michigan
- Texas
- Florida
- Rhode Island
- Minnesota
- Arizona
- Guam
- Indiana
- Montana
- Wyoming
- California
- Maryland
- Nebraska
- New Jersey
- Wisconsin
- Arkansas
- Connecticut
- Alabama
- Massachusetts
- Georgia
- Nevada
- Kentucky
- New Mexico
- Missouri
- Tennessee
- South Dakota
- North Carolina
- South Carolina
- North Dakota
- Louisiana
- Illinois
- West Virginia
- Mississippi
- Pennsylvania
- Puerto Rico
- US Virgin Islands
- American Samoa
- Northern Mariana Islands
Facebook and MySpace Usage by City
Here’s another way of looking at social networking adoption rates by geography. This data was provided by comScore. It shows penetration of visitors to individual sites from a given DMA (as opposed to States). The data is from May 2008.
From this comScore data, you can make conclusions like “Folks from New Orleans are more active on MySpace than folks from San Antonio” or “Milwaukee’s Facebook users are much more active than Chicago’s Facebook users.”
It’s a different slice on the same questions: Which locations are embracing social media and social networking sites at the fastest rate? Which locations are not jumping on the social networking bandwagon?
We welcome your comments regarding this analysis and which states are most active with social networking. Please also visit my website Gaebler Ventures.
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