So every webpage you visit these days is required to have a minimum of twenty social media buttons so that visitors can send updates of their internet activities shooting across the web for all to see. I bet you didn’t know that. Tweet, Like, +1, Pin, Stumble, inShare, Digg, post to Reddit (along with a million other ways to share stuff online) – you probably do at least a couple of these things. But have you mentally indexed certain sites for certain content or purposes? Whether you know it or not, you have.

A new study from The Search Agency peels back the skin of the social media onion to find out what places people have designated as their online playgrounds and what places people try to church it up and keep it professional. Some of the results won’t come as any surprise to you, such as Reddit being the place where people go to get their jollies whereas LinkedIn tends to be the professional niche of the net. See, not so surprising, is it? However, that’s merely the first layer of the big old Vidalia internet; the good stuff is many layers deeper.

For instance, the ladyfolk of the internet, of whom there are tons, haven’t really taken so much to Google+. Search Agency found that there’s over twice as many guys +1’ing on the social network than there are women. More, Google+ is also where the students and software engineers tend to hang about.

As for referral traffic driven through social media sites, Pinterest is like a giant sperm whale gobbling up a mouthful of squid because it drives more referral traffic than Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube combined. Facebook, of course, is the king of referral traffic, but StumbleUpon, which has been quietly indexed as a place people like to go for some good times, is the second highest source of referral traffic after Facebook.

The data collected by Search Agency provides some good direction if you’re looking to market to a particular niche of people. Sure, Facebook and Twitter provide an easy outlet to fire a scattershot of content across a wide swath of people, but if you’re interested in fine-tuning your aim, you might want to focus on a site like Pinterest or Google+, depending on what you’re target audience is.

“By taking a closer look at the dominant audiences on popular platforms, we thought we could show a clearer vision of where businesses should focus their social media strategy on based on each site’s best-selling points,” said David Carrillo, social media manager at The Search Agency. “As marketers, we understand the importance of sewing our efforts in the most effective places.”

So have a look and see if you see yourself reflected in any of the social media profiles that Search Agency has compiled. Groups of people in the physical world always self-segregate into cliques, so why should the internet that all of these people from the physical world reflect anything different?

Social Sharing Button Playground brought to you byThe Search Agency