Research about Facebook never seems to stop coming, with more and more studies revealing just how we use and love the social networking site that has changed the way we use the internet and connect with others. Neilsen have released their ‘state of the media: the social media report’ that shows us just how addicted we are to Facebook, confirming that 22.5% of all time we spend online is spent on social media, a figure that doubles the amount of time we spend online gaming and triples the minutes we spend e-mailing.

70% of all active internet users in the US are a part of Facebook, and of these, 62% are women. Furthermore, Americans spend a whopping total of 53.5 billion minutes of Facebook, a number dwarfing the next highest social media sites such as Google’s Blogger (723.8 million monthly minutes) and Tumblr (623.5 million monthly minutes).

As advertisers scramble to cash in on the amount of time people spend on the site, recent data by SocialCode and Buddymedia reveals just how effective facebook advertising is in different age groups. In general, older facebook users (50+) are 31% more likely than users aged 18-29 to click through to advertiser’s websites, whereas the younger groups will most likely click “like” as an expression of brand interest. So far 17.7% of ad display budgets in the US are going to Facebook. With so much money and effort going into Facebook ads, brands should be clever about their image; those appealing to a younger audience should focus their attention on creating an engaging and appealing Facebook brand page in order to benefit most from the way a younger audience behaves and interacts with advertising.