Perhaps the most telling change coming in America is something that was much-discussed in the days following the 2012 presidential election. The nation is becoming less white, and the Census Bureau predicts that white non-hispanics will no longer make up over half of the U.S. population by 2043.

“The next half century marks key points in continuing trends — the U.S. will become a plurality nation, where the non-Hispanic white population remains the largest single group, but no group is in the majority,” said Thomas L. Mesenbourg, acting director for the bureau.

The white non-hispanic population is expected to peak in 2024, just shy of 200 million people. It is then expected to decline slowly, unlike every other ethnic group.

The Hispanic population of the U.S. is expected to more than double between now and 2060, as is the Asian population. The black population is predicted to rise slightly to 14.7% of the total population in 2060. Other minorities, such as Native Hawaiians, Alaska Natives, and Native American populations, are also expected to rise in the coming decades. Overall, minorities which now make up 37% of the U.S. population are predicted to comprise 57% of the population in 2060.

In addition to its ethnic shift, the U.S. is expected to grow much older by 2060. Citizens over 65 years old now only make up around one-seventh of the current population, but are expected to make up one-fifth of the U.S. population in 2060. People over 85 years old are predicted to triple in number by 2060, when they are expected to represent 4.3% of the population.

Today, Facebook has released a bunch of data from election day, including a demographic breakdown of who clicked that “I’m a voter” button.

First off, the big number – over 9 million users said they voted on Facebook.

Next, Facebook’s data decisively shows that women were much more likely to share the fact that they voted with the Facebook community – almost twice as likely, in fact. Facebook makes a point to say that it shouldn’t surprise us, considering women are twice as likely to share on Facebook in general (comments, likes, status updates).

They also looked at the Facebook voting in relation to political affiliation. Users with democratic beliefs were more likely to click “I’m voting.” In fact, users that labelled themselves as affiliated with Barack Obama, Democratic, Liberal Democratic, Very Liberal, Liberal, and Green were all the most likely to say they voted on Facebook.

And as you would expect, the younger the user, the more likely they were to click “I voted” – no matter the political affiliation.

Some more interesting aspects from the study show that users that liked “Binders full of women” and “Big Bird” were the most likely to share their voting status on the network.

You can read the full report here.

Based on their findings, if you picked a Twitter user at random, it would be a woman, aged 15-25, living in America. She has a little over 200 followers and has sent out just shy of 600 tweets. That’s your average Twitter user. But the study looked into some more interesting demographics behind just who makes up the Twitterverse.

In terms of geography, we just told you that the majority fo users (51%) come from the United States. But the next most Twitter-happy region is the U.K., followed by Australia, Brazil, and Canada. Other than the U.K. (17%), no other country registers even 5% of the total Twitter population.

When it comes to their level of interaction on the network, a Twitter user has about 208 followers on average. 6% of Twitter users have no followers. On average, a Twitter user follows around 102 people. 10% of Twitter users don’t follow anyone.

Beevolve also looked at color preferences for Twitter backgrounds, an admittedly unique dataset. For girls, purple is the most common color used, followed by hot pink and brown. For the guy, it’s dark colors. “Shark,” a dark steel grey, commanded 36% of the profiles analyzed.

Check out this word cloud of the most common words used on people’s bios:

Finally, a majority of Twitter users access the service via iOS, almost 69% to 31% over Android. 77% of users access Twitter via the official Twitter app, if they use an app (32% tweet from the web).

Of course, taking a bunch of different demographics and constructing the “average user” is not a perfect science. Plus, Beevolve acknowledges that 25% of users have never even tweeted. This either means that they are bots, duplicates, or simply users who prefer not to submit their own thoughts into the Twitterverse. But this is a fun look into who makes up the Twitterverse. So if you’re a marketer – here’s who you should target.

[h/t WSJ]
[Image courtesy Kalexanderson, Flickr]

As the lead graphic reveals, many of Twitter’s daily users are of the non-Caucasian variety. Mashable spelled it out for those who don’t follow graphs and charts:

Twitter adoption is also higher among non-white Internet users, proportionately speaking. A full 25% of online African Americans and 19% of online Hispanics use Twitter, compared to 9% of whites.

African Americans and Hispanics are also more active on the service; an impressive 10% of African Americans and 5% of Hispanics in the survey say they use Twitter on a daily basis, compared to 3% of whites.

While looking for an explanation of why these numbers are higher in the African-American and the Latino communities, Stowe Boyd offered this as a potential explanation:

Perhaps most intriguing is the demographic gap: 25% of African-Americans and 19% of Hispanics use the service, compared with 9% of Non-Hispanic Whites. Perhaps linked to the use of entertainment and cultural leaders?

The bolded section offers an interesting perspective, because if Boyd’s theory is accurate, it indicates we’re still a nation of sycophantic trend followers, regardless of how dark or light our skin is. Another writer, Tumblr Greg Battle, dives a little deeper and looks at the marketing of mobile devices to these communities; but first, he makes this interesting observation:

…there’s been reports that African Americans account for 25% of all U.S. Tweets in terms of volume while being only 13% of the population. This last fact can be seen anecdotally when witnessing the pervasive number of urban themed hashtag memes.

As I’ve said previously, Twitter is the black 4chan.

As for reasons why this is, Battle discusses the digital divide in relation to Internet adoption. White users have had access to the Internet longer than the communities Battle is referencing, giving them ample opportunity to enjoy the anonymity the Internet offered back before the explosion of social media:

most of the internet’s usage growth occurred in private, where people tried on identities, utilized pseudonyms, connected with strangers, consumed the unthinkable, and engaged in fantasies in a world that began and ended at the dial tone.

The divide Battle discusses meant adoption in lower-income communities was much slower than in suburban communities. However, the explosion of the smartphone in terms of popularity has broken down the the digital divide:

Beepers, Motorola 2-Ways, Sidekicks, Blackberrys and now smartphones bridged this privacy gap, allowing urbanites to enjoy in device driven fantasy. It’s from this you get beeper codes, technology as fashion accessory, and friend/follower accumulation as proxy for social proof. If it worked for suburban doctors, it also worked for the urban street pharmacists and those who postured as either one.

In fact, the smartphone industry, which gave increased Internet access to non-white American users, has changed the way they market their devices, all in an effort to attract the “urban” user:

So, the dirty secret of the mobile phone and app industry is that African Americans (and Hispanics, females, and southerners demographically according to PEW) are a leading indicator for mainstreaming mobile social features. There’s a reason why carriers created AMP’d and Boost Mobile instead of Skinny Jeans or Fixie+Facial Hair Mobile…

Case in point, it’s pretty clear Boost Mobile isn’t marketing to the Wall Street/corporate types with the following commercial:

But according to data from Forrester, brands should start targeting seniors in their social media strategies and the younger generations need to begin to accept the fact that Nana and Papa are going to use the site if they like it or not. Privacy settings are there for a reason, kids.

According to a study on Digital Seniors, 60% of U.S. citizens aged 65 and older are online. That means that around 20 million seniors are now denizens of the interwebs. And half of those seniors are on Facebook.

As you can see, email is another popular internet activity of the United States’ seniors. Interestingly enough, gaming is another one – although it’s unclear exactly what kinds of online games are getting their attention. One can assume that at least a small proportion of that 44% are into Facebook-oriented games like FarmVille.

Another interesting find from the study centers reinforces the idea that brands that target Facebook users might need to put a little more emphasis on their older targets. Not only do those aged 65+ have more money to spend than younger kids, but they reported a higher brand loyalty than the general U.S. audience. 63% said that they stick with a brand when they like it, compared to only 53% of all online adults.

With all the talk about Facebook contemplating opening itself up to kids under the age of 13 and how that could impact advertising dollars, let us not forget that folks on the other side of the coin also command some serious attention.

The blog post starts off by stating that more than half of U.S. mobile subscribers now use smartphones: 50.4% as of March 2012. Though it also names Apple as the leading manufacturer of those smartphones, recent reports suggest that Samsung might now be the leader in smartphone sales. Regardless of the manufacturer, Nielsen’s number show that Google’s Android OS has a solid lead in the number of smartphones it runs on, 48.5% compared to Apple’s 32%. These numbers are close to the figures comScore recently released, though comScore shows Android as having more than half of the smartphone market. Both have RIM dwindling to around a 12% share of the market.

The most interesting portion of the Nielsen blog post was the demographic information about smartphone users. Though the gender breakdown of smartphone users is almost even (50.9 % female), it turns out that minorities are far more likely than white Americans to use smartphones. More Hispanics, African Americans, and Asian Americans use smartphones than use feature phones. More than two-thirds of Asian Americans (67.3%) use smartphones. The percentage of white Americans that use smartphones is less than half, 44.7%. Take a look at the chart, which accompanies the blog post, below.

What do you think? Is there an underlying cause for the rapid adoption of smartphones by minorities? Leave a comment below and let us know.

(graph image courtesy Nielsen)

Smartphone ownership is about youth and income. Apparently, you have to have at least one of those things working in your favor in order to be compelled to purchase a smartphone.

Smartphone penetration is highest in people aged 25-34 making $100K+ a year. And across the board, with all age groups, money had a direct impact on whether or not the survey participants had a smartphone. The youngest subset of the survey (18-34) were more likely to have a smartphone even if they pulled in less than $15K a year – but once you got to the older groups, money became a requirement.

Check out Nielsen’s graph below:

Nielsen also reports that people who have recently made a mobile phone purchase are overwhelmingly choosing to buy a smartphone instead of a feature phone. Over all ago groups, 69% of those who bought a phone in the last 3 months bought a smartphone. It’s even more likely when you talk about folks aged 18-34. 8 out of 10 of them chose a smartphone over a feature phone.

As you can see above, Nielsen says that among all mobile phone users, 48% have a smartphone. This is up almost 10% from a few months ago, where they reported that 40% of mobile users had smartphones.

Google+ is progressing from an all-male frat house to a slightly more diversified frat party. Recently, that’s probably being aided by the fact that signing up for a Google profile now means signing up for a Google+ profile as well. Whatever the reason, we’ve seen progression over the last few months. When Google was just a few weeks old, figures estimated the network to be a legitimate good ol’ boys club at 88% male. A few months in, it had leveled out a bit to 71% male. Shortly after those statistics were reported, another company echoed the findings with a 70-30 split.

Of course, not every analytics company out there reported the exact same user stats, but most of them were close – at least 2/3 male, oftentimes a bit more.

Now, months removed from those reports, Website-Monitoring has provided us with some Google+ demographics that show the girls are trying to break into the club, but struggling. Basically, Google+ is still a bunch of dudes.

According to their analysis, Google+ is still 67% male. Their sample size for this statistic is just under 44 million, which is just under half of the estimated total Google+ user base.

It appears that the demographics aren’t shifting as quickly as many thought that they would. C’mon ladies – where you at?

BONUS: Their study also looked at other facts about Google+ in its current state, including:

• Most followed person on Google+ is Britney Spears, and the most popular page is Coldplay’s.
• The top three Google+ crazy countries are the United States, India, and Brazil (in that order).
• The top occupation?  Student, by a longshot.
• Most users are still single, a stat reported in previous reports.

Here’s a spiffy infographic with some more fun stats:

Many studies have found an addictive quality to social media the cause teens to exhibit emotional withdrawal. As part of a well-publicized study, one teen who found himself separated from social media said that he “began to feel distress and despair.” Despair? Geez.

According to new information from the Pew Internet Project, young people are not the only ones who are finding the allure of social media too compelling to ignore.

Pew surveyed 2,277 adults over the course of one month and found that 65% of all adult internet users say they use a social networking site. Last year, that number was 61% in the same type of survey.

Social media usage among those aged 30 and younger didn’t really budge. One year ago, 60% said they are on a site like Facebook or Myspace. This year, 61% made the same claim. No, it wasn’t the young generation that made the move – it was the boomers.

Among users aged 50 to 64, social media use has grown from 20% to 32%. That’s a 60% increase over the last year. It looks like your father or your grandpa has found their way to The Twitter.

Although more of this older generation (I apologize for the title, they aren’t “old,” I guess) is logging on to social networking sites, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are checking them everyday like the younger generation does.

“The graying of social networking sites continues, but the oldest users are still far less likely to be making regular use of these tools,” said Mary Madden, Senior Research Specialist and co-author of the report. “While seniors are testing the waters, many Baby Boomers are beginning to make a trip to the social media pool part of their daily routine.”

Another interesting finding from the survey: Young women are truly the queens of social media. 89% of females aged 18 to 29 report that they use social media sites. 69% say they check them every day.

As part of the survey, Pew also asked respondents to say what they thought about social media. And as a result, this word cloud was born:

Interesting to see the prominence of the words “good” “fun” and “convenient” and the relative irrelevance of the sentiments “annoying,” “intrusive” and “confusing.”

That analysis was based on a little over 4.4 million Google+ users, a little under a fifth of the reported total users at the time. What it found was that the landscape was dominated by men, by a huge margin of 71.2% to 27.8%. Other interesting stats included to overwhelming population of engineers and Google employees using the social network

Bime has updated their dashboard, this time including a voluntary sample of over 10 million Google+users. Even with Google opening up the registration to allow many more users, the male/female ratio remains basically unchanged. The girls have yet to flock to Google+.

Okay, the dynamic has shifted a little bit. Instead of 72-28 in favor of the guys, the figure is now 70-30. Come on, gals, it’s looking like an awkward middle school party in here.

Here’s what has changed in the last few weeks:

First, the occupation landscape has shifted. Back in July, users overwhelmingly identified themselves as engineers, developers, and designers. In August, the largest occupation has shifted to student.

In July, the company with the largest percentage of Google+ users was, unsurprisingly, Google. Now, the largest employment group identified by users is “self-employed.” New entrants into the top companies list include Sony, HP, and strangely enough, Subway.

One interesting stat to emerge is the number of inactive users on Google+. Apparently, 83% of users are classified as inactive. To be fair, reports have stated that a high percentage of Twitter users are classified “inactive” as well. No extra details about what constitutes “inactive” are given.

The prevalent stat, however, continues to be the male dominance of the social network in its early stages. That gender distribution has to level out, right?

Check out the visualization below -