★ Who Reads my Blog? [Demographics]

I’ve done some research recently based on who replies, retweets, comments and shares my blog posts. I get a lot of private emails and Facebook messages responding to posts as well. Without revealing numbers, I wanted to share a bit about who reads my blog. It’s pretty interesting data. There are two groups of readers and a third that’s surprisingly very small.

Group One:

• 11-21 years old
• Tech-savvy
• Mostly in high school
• Interests include tech, photography, travel, figuring out life
• Very engaged. Comments often, most feedback comes in the form of email or Twitter replies asking follow up questions
• Certainly, the numbers lean upper-middle class. Access to good technology, free time, lots of interests and activities and they have the opportunity to travel and try out new tech toys

The interesting part about this group is that a ton of my “life” posts are inspired by these young readers. Questions about photography, writing, blogging, working for Apple and moving to San Francisco. I even get questions about breaking the news to their parents that they want to one day live in San Francisco. This group is very inquisitive with very little opinions or stories of their own. Also, when I ask how they found my blog, the answer is usually that they found it through one of my tech posts but got hooked when reading the other content about life and growing up.

Group Two:

• 40-65 years old
• Not tech-savvy but more than most people in their age range
• Education is always varied but I’d say the majority lean in high school & some college realm
• Interests aren’t outwardly. Most are parents who work hard to support their families or those who are on the cusp of retirement with kids in college
• Slightly less engaged but I hear from at least 5 people after each post via a personal email where they will share a story with me with some advice for me on those posts where I think out loud and plan future things like a move or an idea to take on a new hobby and so on.
• Middle-class is the average for this age group. Mostly PC users (70% of my readers are PC users) and most do not have a smartphone and generally read and reply to my blog posts in the evenings after 8PM

What I like about this group is the thoughtful emails and engagement I get. I learn so much from this group because I hear their stories and the email threads will go on for days where we share our stories about life, love and growing older. I also get the occasional funny email where someone says, “my son is in college and really scatter brained. Can you share a bit where you got started and how you got to where you are today?”  Most importantly, these individuals are not passionate about technology so my occasional tech post will lead to questions about things and about certain products and buying advice. Only a few of these individuals follow me on Twitter and those that do don’t even have avatars for their profiles.

Group Tree:

There is a group three. This group is the most obvious one. These are the people who click my links on Twitter and reply there and mostly only read posts that are tech oriented but sometimes skim through my life and photography posts and may retweet those one out of every 20 of them. It’s just not really what they’re into reading.

This group is largely based in large cities, higher income, tech oriented jobs. This group is late 20s, early 30s and highly engaged with sharing my tech content on Twitter as their way of commenting or agreeing. If you count “shares” of my tech content, it’s my most commented materials but this group doesn’t comment on posts, they just retweet it or write a post on their own blog linking to mine as a response.

This group interests me because it’s my career and what I do day after day but a lot of it is the echo chamber. We just spend all day reading only posts that we agree with and ignoring the ones we don’t. We share the posts we like on Twitter to strengthen our brand and new ideas are rarely introduced. Most is a regurgitation of old content.

Either way, this is the group the got me started with blogging and how I make my money but not really what I like talking to. I’m more interested in doing tech than talking about it.

The first two groups are the most exciting. Influencing young people and learning from those who have come before me is what I find most valuable.

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Thanks for reading. Just thought it would be interesting to break these down. Maybe, a year from now, this will change? We’ll see.