Infographic: The American Identity According to Social Media

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Odds are that you're on at least one major social network. (There are about 150 million Facebook users in the United States alone.) And you've been on that network -- or on those networks -- for years, feeding in information about yourself, updating your status, posting pictures of your latest vacations and responding to events and messages from friends. Over time, those networks have learned a lot about you, about us. What do they know?

Social media strategy firm Hasai put together the infographic embedded below after deciding to find out. Not focused on the individual bits of information -- phone numbers and movie preferences, email addresses and gender -- Hasai took a step back to see what a bunch of data could tell us about the American people as a whole.

Infographics are always a bit of a hodgepodge of statistics culled from a variety of sources. Here, we sort through the clutter and pull out some of our favorite facts and figures:

  • Americans are followers: Nearly half of all Americans are now members of at least one social network, double the proportion of just two years ago.
  • Americans have a lot to say: Nearly half (48 percent) of all bloggers are based in the U.S.
  • Americans like to give advice: 28 percent of U.S. adults say that they give advice about purchases on social networking sites.
  • Americans are nostalgic: The average Facebook user has 229 friends. While less than 10 percent are college friends, more than 20 percent are friends from high school.
  • Americans want to be distracted from reality: The more than 63 million active users of FarmVille spend an average of 15 minutes a day pretending to run a farm. Over the course of a year, that's 5,475 minutes -- the equivalent of a full-time job for over two weeks.
  • Americans love routine: Of the more than 149 million Americans actively using Facebook, 70 percent of these active users in the U.S. log on to the social network daily. 
  • Americans are obsessed with celebrities: The five most followed Twitter accounts are those of Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, barack Obama, Katy Perry, and Britney Spears.
  • Americans love television and they like others to know it: 77 percent of Americans report they use social media to share their love of a show, 65 percent use it as a platform to help save their favorite shows, and 35 percent use it to try to introduce new shows to their friends.

Check out more Infographics on the Technology Channel.

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Nicholas Jackson is an associate editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees the Health channel. A former media aggregator for Slate, he has also worked for Encyclopaedia Britannica, Texas Monthly and other publications.

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