A rather interesting statistical view of the digital landscape in Europe has just been published by comScore.

The report provides insights on content categories, trends in social networking (and the knock-on effects on email and instant messaging), with a great snapshot of what's happening in online advertising, video, search and smartphone use.

Key points worth highlighting (with a nod to the older demographic that tends to interest fundraisers) include:

  • The Dutch and the British spend most time online (31.39 and 30.38 hours / month respectively).
  • Europeans spend more time on Facebook than any other site.
  • As you might imagine, this means social networking and photo sharing are the fastest growing things to do on the web.
  • Which also means that social networking has been the main driver in the growth in display advertising.
  • Email use is still growing amongst those aged 35 and over (though nowhere near as fast as social networking).
  • There seems to be a shifting preference to watch fewer, longer videos online (the average length of a video is now 5.6 minutes).
  • Europe-wide, smartphones account for about 30% of the mobile market.
  • 28% of European Facebook users are aged over 45…

Picture 15

…but over 36% of LinkedIn users are in the same age group.

With the significantly older (and wealthier) profile of LinkedIn users, it makes me wonder why I hardly ever hear about it as a fundraising medium. It might not be as sexy as Facebook and Twitter, but with the right offer it could be far more successful.

I personally find LinkedIn a great source of information on attitudes to giving amongst higher-value donors. We are just starting to use it to enhance the higher-value DM appeals that we create at Bluefrog. As you can imagine, It's a great way of learning about prospects. But it's useful in a number of other ways too.

If you're new to fundraising on LinkedIn, you might find these tips or this case study useful.

I'd also suggest you download the full paper from comScore (it's available here free of charge but registration is required). You'll also find the 2010 US digital review and the 2010 mobile year in review at the same site.