We found that AOL and Gmail users tend to favor Facebook, while Hotmail and Yahoo users tend to use Facebook and MySpace equally. Twitter is the third-most popular social network, followed by LinkedIn.

Here are the results:

Social Network Memberships of AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Email Users

Highlights

• Over 29% of AOL and Gmail’s user base have Facebook memberships, but only around 13% have MySpace memberships
• Around 20% of Hotmail and Yahoo users are on Facebook and MySpace
• On a percentage basis, Twitter and LinkedIn are more than twice as popular with Gmail users as they are with AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo users

MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn vs. Facebook

The table below shows the popularity of MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn with these email users as a percentage of Facebook’s popularity. For example, the number of AOL users on MySpace is only 43% of the number of AOL users on Facebook.

Highlights

• Twitter is around 4-5x less popular than Facebook with AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo users
• Hotmail and Yahoo users tend to have similar social network preferences

Concluding Remarks

Facebook is the most popular social network with AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo user base, although MySpace rivals Facebook’s popularity with Hotmail and Yahoo users. In general, Twitter’s adoption still pales in comparison with Facebook and MySpace, although it will be interesting to see how Twitter’s growth affects its popularity in the near future. LinkedIn’s popularity is lowest among these email users, which might be attributed to an increased likelihood that LinkedIn users register for membership with their business emails instead.

Interested in better understanding your consumers’ social network habits?

We’d be happy to help – to find out what we can tell you about your audience, contact us at info@rapleaf.com.

Related posts:

1. Social Insight Into AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Email Users – Part 1: Age and Gender
2. Social Insight Into AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Email Users – Part 2: Social Media Profiles and Friend Counts
3. Rapleaf Study on Social Network Users in Swing States: Myspace is the melting pot of social networks, Hi5 is favored in New Mexico

Unlike age and gender data, online activity and friend counts do not have clear trends across email service providers. What the data seems to suggest is that Hotmail users tend to have slightly more social media profiles, and Gmail users tend to be slightly better connected overall.

Here are the results:

Social Media Profile Counts of AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Email Users

Highlights

• 85% of users have two or fewer social media memberships
• On average, Hotmail users have slightly more social media profiles than AOL, Gmail, and Yahoo users

Online Friend Counts of AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Email Users

Highlights

• On average, 66% of sampled users have less than 10 friends online
• Just over 7% of users have more than 150 friends online
• Gmail users average the most friends overall with 46.2; Yahoo users average the least with 40.0

Concluding Remarks

The vast majority of email users have two or fewer social media memberships and less than 50 friends online. Gmail users tend to be slightly better connected while Hotmail users generally have more social media memberships. Marketers interested in word-of-mouth advertising on social media should focus their efforts on the 7% of users with more than 150 friends to engage influencers.

The next part of this study will look at social network memberships.

Interested in analyzing your customer email list?

We’d be happy to help – to find out what we can tell you about your audience, contact us at info@rapleaf.com.

Related posts:

1. Social Insight Into AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Email Users – Part 1: Age and Gender
2. Social Insight Into AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Email Users – Part 3: Social Network memberships
3. Rapleaf Study: Popularity and fan demographics of Michael Jackson, The Beatles, Elvis, and Madonna across social media

For this study, we sampled 120,000 users with @aol.com, @gmail.com, @hotmail.com, and @yahoo.com emails, and looked at their age, gender, online activity, friend counts, and social network memberships.

We broke this study into several parts so this post will only cover the age and gender data.

Overall, people who use these four webmail clients tend to be young, with over 75% of all users under 35 years of age. Part of the reason for this younger skew is that these demographics are based on self-reported data from public social media profiles, and the people who use social media are generally younger. Even so, comparing demographics between each of the email services offers insight into userbase differences.

Here’s what we found:

Ages of AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Email Users

Highlights

• Nearly 50% of Gmail users are under 25 years of age
• AOL users tend to be older, with 31% of users being at least 36 years old
• Yahoo and Hotmail email users have similar age distributions

Gender of AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Email Users

Highlights

• Hotmail has the greatest gender skew with over 57% of users being male
• Gmail tends to have more female than male users (53% vs 47%)
• AOL and Yahoo are gender balanced

Concluding Remarks

Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo users tend to be younger while AOL users are slightly older. Hotmail’s audience tends to made up of more males, Gmail users tend to lean female, and AOL and Yahoo users are equally likely to be male and female.

Next time, we’ll study friend counts and how active these email users are online.

Interested in analyzing your customer email list?

We’d be happy to help – to find out what we can tell you about your audience, contact us at info@rapleaf.com.

Related posts:

1. Social Insight Into AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Email Users – Part 2: Social Media Profiles and Friend Counts
2. Social Insight Into AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Email Users – Part 3: Social Network memberships
3. Rapleaf Study on Demographics, Online Activity of Twitter Influencers in CPG’s Customer List