Where IT pros do their social networking

IT professionals favor LinkedIn by a wide margin over other popular social-networking sites including Facebook and MySpace, according to an online survey of 500-plus IT executives, managers and developers conducted by Network World in January.

According to the survey, 63% of IT pros said they use LinkedIn compared to 44% using Facebook and 20% using MySpace.

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These figures are up significantly from the same survey a year ago, when 41% of respondents said they use LinkedIn, 23% used MySpace and 20% used Facebook.

Another popular service with IT pros is Twitter, which wasn't mentioned in last year's survey but now commands a 14% share of respondents.

In contrast, news-aggregation sites seem to be losing ground. Use of Slashdot dropped from 23% last year to 21% this year, while Digg fell from 12% to 11%. Fewer than 5% of survey respondents said they visit such sites as Stumbleupon, Technorati or Reddit.

Overall, the use of social-networking sites has risen significantly from last year. The number of IT pros who don't visit these sites has dropped to 16% from 32% a year ago. That means 84% of IT pros are visiting social-networking, social media or social-bookmarking sites regularly.

IT pros are visiting social-networking sites more often than they did a year ago. Half of survey respondents said they visit these sites every day or several times per week. Another 24% visit these sites once a week.

Most IT pros use social-networking sites for work and play. Only 29% said they visit these sites for entertainment only, while the remaining 70% said they visited these sites mostly for work or evenly for work and play.

A majority of IT pros -- 64% -- said they are using social-networking sites more than they did a year ago.

Survey respondents were split on whether social-networking sites increase their productivity at work. Only 14% agreed or strongly agreed with the idea that social networking makes people more productive at work. In contrast, 40% disagreed or strongly disagreed with this idea, and another 40% were neutral on the question.

The online survey attracted 583 respondents. The majority of the survey respondents -- 75% -- hold network-related IT positions ranging from CIO and IT management to applications development and security. Another 9% of respondents are IT industry consultants, 7% are corporate management and 9% hold other positions.