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(disclaimer: I work for Google Consumer Surveys)

Here is a February 2012 study from Pew Internet, citing that 66% of the American internet population uses social media.

http://pewinternet.org/Commentary/2012/March/Pew-Internet-So...

Our data, in addition to the survey shared on HN earlier, shows very similar statistics.

It's not exactly the same question. Wouldn't that response include much more than Facebook and Twitter? E.g. Pinterest, LinkedIn, Reddit, Google+, a long tail of social media sites?

It's a great point. To compare benchmarks, we'd have to consider...6 months in behavioral changes since the Pew survey; the likelihood that long tail users also use the main social properties; what we actually classify as a social network; medium effects on answer bias and more.

I couldn't agree more with your points about the importance of survey design. Our hope with GCS is to provide a real time, affordable, iterative mechanism for conducting this type of research.

The challenges faced when benchmarking against Pew and others, is, I believe, an indication of the value of continually collecting and updating data.

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