• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 22, 2012

Social's influence on consumers continues to increase, depending on the network. Males seem to flock to tech-oriented sites like Slashdot at 87%, followed by Hacker News at 77% and Stack Overflow at 76%. Females like Pinterest, 79%; Goodreads, 70%; and Blogger, 66%.

Facebook and Twitter have the same gender user percentage, with 40% being male and 60% female. That's according to findings released Wednesday.

Pingdom used DoubleClick Ad Planner to mine demographic data in the United States and create the study across numerous social sites. The findings analyze data across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Reddit, Hacker News, Slashdot, Github, Stack, Overflow, Orkut, Quora, WordPress, Blogger, Flickr, MySpace, Tagged, Hi5, LiveJournal, Yelp, deviantART, StumbleUpon, Googdreads, and Last.fm.

Ironically, Pingdom omitted Google+ information from the study for lack of data accessible in the Google DoubleClick platform.

When averaging the age of social users across all the sites in the survey, 26% are between 25 and 34. Those ages 35 to 44 make up 25%; 45 to 54, 19%; 18 to 24, 16%; 55 to 64, 6%; 0 to 17, 5%; and 65 and older, 2%.

There are substantial differences in the age demographics of individual sites. Marketers looking to target brand messages to social users ages 25 to 34 might want to use Orkut, Hi5, Stack Overflow, Blogger and Hacker News. Those ages 35 to 44 more often flock to Stack Overflow, Quora and Slashdot.

LinkedIn attracts users 35 to 54. Those 65 and older tend to like LinkedIn, Yelp, Flickr, and WordPress.

Breaking the numbers down further, when it comes to Twitter users, 55% of tweeters are 35 and older, compared with 63% at Pinterest; 65% at Facebook; and 79% at LinkedIn.

Some sites tend to attract younger uses. Some 58% of Reddit users are under 35, compared with 60% at Github, 63% at Hi5, 69% at both Hacker News and deviantART, and 83% at Orkut.

Based on the sites in this survey, the estimated age of the average social media user is under 37, according to Pingdom's data. LinkedIn supports the oldest user base, with the average member being 44, compared with Facebook at almost 51 years old and Twitter at 37 years old.

The age of the average Facebook users rose two years, while the average age of Twitter users declined by two years since Pingdom's last study 2.5 years ago.