In Chitika Insights’ latest study, we investigated the difference in browser use across different social media websites. We pulled a week’s worth of data that covered millions of ad impressions to try to identify characteristics among each site’s users.
In terms of browser user, the first thing our Insights team saw was that social media sites are divided into two camps: sites where Internet Explorer (MSIE) dominates and sites where it had little presence.
MSIE is the leading browser on Facebook and Twitter, the two most popular and widespread social networking sites. In fact, Facebook’s browser use breakdown pretty much matches the overall browser market – probably because everyone uses Facebook. On the other hand, sites like Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Google+ have a much more targeted and specific audience. In these more tech-savvy communities Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are the favorites, with MSIE taking a much smaller share. This shift among tech-forward web users could potentially point to coming changes for MSIE and the web browser market as a whole. Alternatively, could the browser composition of these sites move in the direction of Facebook as they grow to be more diverse?
Now what about Digg? Although viewed by outsiders as one in same, the communities of Digg and Reddit are different in many ways, even after all of the version changes (V4 anyone?). For browser of choice, Redditors are twice as likely to use Chrome and 50% more likely to use Firefox. Diggers on the other hand, are more than 4 times as likely as a Redditor to use MSIE, a browser which offers far less customization.
And finally, we hope you haven’t forgotten about MySpace, because MSIE users surely haven’t. Of all social networks, MSIE does best on MySpace, capturing more than half of all users. Maybe they should change the name to MSIEspace…
You can tell a lot about a community based on the browsers that it chooses to use. Perhaps publishers and advertisers could benefit from understanding which browsers are typically used for their website. In that way, they can get a handle on their target demographic, and how to design their content more appropriately.