When considering whether to take the social media leap as part of your customer communication strategy there are a number of factors to consider; who will maintain those avenues, how will brand strength be reflected and leveraged, which particular service is most appropriate, etc. Each of these are an essential part of the evaluation process and each can go to a much greater depth of analysis depending on the level of research required by your company. However, before you bother putting on the headlamp and mining the depths of these statistics I ask you to keep it simple.
First, remember these methods are intended to help create new customer relationships or strengthen existing ones. Now, clarify who is your ideal audience. Who are you hoping to reach, please, and support using social media? Then take a look at what kind of user demographics are available for the channels you're considering and see how they match up.
To save you some time I've gathered some surface stats from Quancast for your consideration.
45%Men • 55% Women
Age: 13-17 years old 20% • 18-34 years old 45% • 35-49 years old 20%
Income: $0-30K 16% • 30-60K 25% • 60-100K 29% • 100K+ 29%
More than 350 million active users
More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook
avail 15 languages
YouTube
50% Men • 50% Women
Age: 12-17 years old 19% • 18-34 years old 35% • 35-49 years old 23%
13 languages
47% Men • 53% Women
Age: 13-17 years old 10% • 18-34 years old 44% • 35-49 years old 28%
Income: $0-30K 20% • 30-60K 28% • 60-100K 27%
23.3 M Total Users
Widely accessible from text messaging/phones
I encourage you to go gather even more focused information to correspond with your specific desired audience variables. Make a list, cross check them and then see which services are the best match. Then, and only then, begin to explore the other considerations regarding your social media strategy. Starting your process with a customer focus will help guide you to the most effective customer communication tool.
*Similar statistics and analytics are available for any and all social media services (LinkedIn, Wordpress, Tumblr, Flikr, etc.) from http://www.quantcast.com