danah boyd mentions research by Eszter Hargittai about the characteristics of 1060 first year students at the diverse University of Illinois-Chicago campus during February and March of 2007. In danah's post Race/ethnicity and parent education differences in usage of Facebook and MySpace, she says that the study :

… suggests that Facebook and MySpace usage are divided by race/ethnicity and parent education (two common measures of "class" in the U.S.).

While Eszter is not able to measure the other aspects of lifestyle that I was trying to describe that differentiate usage, she is able to show that Facebook and MySpace usage differs by race/ethnicity and parent education. These substitutes for "class" can be contested, but what is important here is that there is genuinely differences in usage patterns, even with consistent familiarity. People are segmenting themselves in networked publics and this links to the ways in which they are segmented in everyday life.

[Via apophenia: Race/ethnicity and parent education differences in usage of Facebook and MySpace.]

If you're thinking your target audience / client / customer group may be using social networking sites, then that would be a logical place to go to find them.

There's not a lot of this kind of research around yet, and the study mentioned above is in the USA not in New Zealand. What it suggests is that you need to do some informal research of your own. Ask your 'clients' if they use social networking sites. If they do, ask them which ones. And, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us your anonymous statistics — add them as a comment on this post.

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