Social Networking Fans Tap Multiple Sites

A report from Parks Associates finds social networkers are "chronically unfaithful," with many maintaining profiles on multiple social networking sites.

A new report from market research firm Parks Associates finds that users of social networking sites are “chronically unfaithful,” with 40 percent of MySpace users maintaining profiles on other social networking sites, with that number going up to 50 percent among users of smaller social networking sites. The study also found about one in six social networking users actively use three or more social networking sites.

The report, Web 2.0 & the New Net, maintains that the high degree of interconnection amongst social networking sites offers a fast-responding, fertile field for application developers, advertisers, and viral media—assuming the material has an appeal to Web users. “MySpace is a growing ecosystem and one that ironically now extends beyond MySpace itself,” said John Barrett, the lead author of the report, in a statement “A handful of users are all it takes to connect new services to the MySpace-centered environment.”

In the report, Parks Associates surveyed a little over 400 social networking users, with a margin of error no better than 5 percent. As a result, the conclusion that one in six social networking users have profiles on three or more sites might be one in five—or as low as one in ten.