As of May 2011, 65% of online adults age 18 and older use a social networking site such as MySpace, Facebook, or LinkedIn,⁷ and 13% of online adults use Twitter.⁸

Many social media sites, including social networking sites such as Facebook and the status-updating service Twitter, enable users to set up the service to automatically post information about their current location along with their updates on the site. Our survey found that 14% of social media users take advantage of these services, and have set up their account to automatically include their location in their posts.

Men, minorities, those making less than $30,000 per year, and those who have not gone to college are significantly more likely than other social media users to use automatic location-tagging. There are no significant differences between social media users of different age groups.