The average 22-year old in the UK has a thousand Facebook friends

A new study indicates that the average 22-year old in the UK claims to have a thousand or more friends on social media sites such as Facebook.

Indeed, the study by consumer research specialists Intersperience revealed that people in their twenties have more than fifty times the amount of cyber-friends than those over fifty years of age, who typically have less than twenty friends on social networks.

Paul Hudson, Chief Executive at Intersperience, said:

“Our research underlines fundamental changes taking place in British society as a result of finally entering the Digital Age. Half the UK population are on Facebook now and the explosion in social networking activity is blurring lines. In a social media context, a ‘friend’ means something different to a 20 year old than to a 50 year old.”

The generational digital gap revealed in this report perhaps shouldn’t be all that surprising, but the figure of a thousand friends may surprise some. Facebook’s official statistics state that the average Facebook user across the board has 130 friends on the social network.