Social networking is the number 1 online activity today, and only a short year ago most people went online to use email. When I think about all the time I’ve spent refreshing my Twitter or Facebook feeds, it makes a lot of sense that social networking is so popular, but just how popular is it if it’s knocked email, an almost essential activity, out of the water?

According to an infographic from TechKing about interesting Twitter and Facebook stats, roughly 7 percent of all Americans use Twitter. That 7 percent is among some of America’s most wealthy individuals. It appears that Twitter users are more educated and have higher incomes than the average citizen. Actually, 30 percent of households who use the microblogging service make a salary over $100,000. Twitter, however, isn’t accessed mostly from its website or official apps — 75 percent of users access the service through third-party apps.

Facebook, on the other hand, accounts for a quarter of all pageviews online, so it’s not surprising that Facebook is the number 1 publisher of display ads and companies are expected to spend over $2 billion on Facebook advertising in 2011. If all of the content that was uploaded on Facebook (such as photos, links and news stories) was printed onto paper and placed side by side it would reach the moon 16 times.

So now we know there are a lot of users between Twitter and Facebook, but just how popular are users of either network? The average Twitter and Facebook users have far less followers than I imagined, making me and my 301 Twitter followers seem sort of popular. However, I must keep in mind there are people like my sister who tweet once every month and don’t follow a soul. They definitely throw the statistic. The data found in the infographic reports that the average Twitter user has 27 followers and the average Facebook user has 130 friends.

To view the full sized infographic, click on the image below.