Social Network Gender Study
2008
by Maisa Dabus

To have a better picture of how men and women
differ on their perception and use on Social
Network, this research was based on detailing,
as it follows, the itens: Blog Scenario and
Other Social Network Scenarios. The
research content was based on online resources
to be listed with original links by the end, and
charts/content to be showed as it's relevant.

BLOG SCENARIO
[Technorati: State of Blogosphere 2008 ] Technorati
The numbers vary but agree that blogs are here
to stay :
comScore MediaMetrix (August 2008)
Universal McCann (March 2008)
Blogs: 77.7 million unique visitors in
184 million WW have started a blog |
the US - Blogs gather more visitors
26.4 US
than Myspace in US
346 million WW read blogs | 60.3 US
Total internet audience 188.9 million
77% of active Internet users read
eMarketer (May 2008)
blogs - More than half of the active
94.1 million US blog readers in 2007
Internet users are Blog's readers
(50% of Internet users) - Blogs
represent half of the Internet users in
US
22.6 million US bloggers in 2007
(12%)

[Social Media Optimization: Women trust blogs ]
- April 2008
Social Media Optimization
The 36.2 million women who actively participate in the blogosphere is
comprosed of 15.1 million who publish at least one post a week and 21.1
million who read and comment to blogs a week; and approximately half
consider blogs a “highly reliable” or “very reliable” source of information and
advice.
(...) “The blogosphere is increasingly becoming the digital ‘kitchen table’ where
individuals can sit down to have an authentic conversation about all the topics
that affect their daily lives - from household products to presidential
candidates.” said Elisa Camahort Page, BlogHer co-founder and COO.
- In here, it shows women are very active as either Blog writters or readers; with
Blogging being a reliable activity that affects their daily lives and decisions.

[Toronto Girl Geek Dinner: Will social media help to bring
more women to tech? ]
Toronto Girl Geek Dinner March 2008
The survey suggests about 35 per
cent of online teen girls blog, while
only 20 per cent of online boys do it.
\"Virtually all of the growth in teen
While teens as a whole rule the
blogging between 2004 and 2006 is
blogosphere - 28 per cent of
due to the increased activity of girls,\"
Internet-using teenagers blog
the survey reported.
compared with only eight per cent of
adults - girls of all ages dominate,
- More specifically about teenagers
according to a recent survey by the
blogging behavior, appoints that teen
Pew Internet & American Life
girls are more likely to blog than teen
Project.
boys, and this number has just being
increasing.

OTHER SOCIAL NETWORKS SCENARIOS
[The Conversation Prism] PR 2.0

[Mininglabs: The social network users study by Rapleaf ]
Mininglabs - August 2008
An interesting point highlighted by the study is that women outnumber men on most social
networks (with the notable exception of LinkedIn and Flickr).
- With these great charts, it starts to become clear a trend for women out coming men on
Social Networks.

Sex ratio is significantly biases toward young women (14-24) on most social
networks. If a point is above the dashed line at 1.0 it means that there are more
women than men, and vice versa. - Again a highlight on younger
women presence as majority online.
From the previous figure, it is clear that social networks can be divided into 3
categories:
the vast majority of social networks exhibit the same pattern than myspace
or facebook
bebo or myyearbook shows a sex ratio bias whatever the age of the users.
Those social networks seem to be mainly populated by women
(myyearbook could even be seen as a female only network)
linkedin and perfspot can be viewed as two “outliers” in this study, showing
a sex ratio bias toward male whatever the age - except for teenagers on
linkedin . At least linkedin is more business focused.
- Often will be noticed that men presence online stands in a more
professional way, when women in a more personal matter.

Young women outnumber men on
social networks. Average profile of
social network sex ratio as a
function of the user’s age.
Looking now at the average profile of the sex
ratio (as depicted in the above figure and
computed by weighting each social network
profile by the corresponding number of users)
we can see also that there is a small sex ratio
bias toward men for 30-40 year old
demographic but this tendency is reversed just
after 40 years old.
It is interesting and also funny to note that this pattern is generally the same in
dating networks,
where there are more men looking for women for 30-40 year old demographic and
vice versa after 40 years.
Finally, note also the significant enrichment of men for 60-80 year old demographic.
- Blogs and dating online services count with a bigger
number of \"older\" users,
men and women.

[BootstrapSEO: Gender Differences in Social Networking ]
BootstrapSEO - June 2008
(...) Traditionally, men are the early adopters of new technologies. But when it comes to
social media, women are at the forefront. (...) According to the survey details [Rapleaf ]
it’s only on LinkedIn that men outnumber women (by about a two-to-one margin).
On each of the other sites studied (MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Plaxo and Hi5),
women outnumber men by about the same two-to-one margin. According to Hoffman, in
part the dominance of women in social media stems from their observation that men tend
to be more “transactional” while women tend to be more “relationship-driven.”
- Again, very well pointed how women dominate presence on relationships/personal
websites, while men are majority on the business/professional focused ones.

[BootstrapSEO: Gender Differences in Social Networking ]
BootstrapSEO June 2008
Indeed, LinkedIn, with its emphasis on job-seeking, making introductions and gathering
business intelligence seems to be the most “transactional” of the sites studied. The other
sites studied tend to focus more on “friending,” sharing photos and profiles, publishing
personal updates, playing casual games with each other — in other words, relationship-
building activities.
Among twentysomethings, women and men are just as likely to be members of social
networks. Facebook, MySpace, and Flixster are extraordinarily popular. But we found that
young women are much more active on these sites than young men. And men above 30—
especially married men—aren’t even joining social networks.
With the notable exceptions of LinkedIn users and venture capitalists in the Bay Area
“friending” everyone on Facebook, married men are not hanging out on social networks.
Married women, however, are joining social networks in droves. In fact, women between
ages 35 and 50 are the fastest-growing segment, especially on MySpace.
-Interesting fact in here: how married men are not as expose socially online as married
women.

[Entrepreneur: Women ahead of men in online Tv, DVR,
Games and Social Media]
Entrepreneur May 2008
Moms with kids under the age of six and English-speaking Hispanic women
were the most active women's segments with 19% and 21% streaming,
respectively. - Study based in US only.
Men continue to lead console gaming (Xbox, PlayStation, Wii, et al) with 50%
participating but the gap is narrowing. Overall, 38% of women played a console
game in the last month, up from 35% a year before. Among teen girls and
young adults 12-24, 69% play console games (up from 63%) and among 25-29,
55% play console games, up from 47%.
- Even on Games World, which its known by being a men environment, women
are to outnumber it, as predicted on researches.

[Entrepreneur: Women ahead of men in online Tv, DVR,
Games and Social Media]
Entrepreneur May 2008
Women also lead the social networking crowd where 42% of online women (vs.
41% of online men) visited a social media site in the last month up from 30%
the year before. In the \"Young Singles\" segment, 74% visit social media sites.
But even in the older \"Empty Nester\" segment of online women 40+,
participation nearly doubled from 14% to 25% driven by a desire to connect
with kids and family.
- Again, any sort of relationship/personal website approach has women leading
it.
Top Digital Lifestyle Products For Women: Digital Camera 24% Wireless/Cell
Phone 23% Game Console/Handheld 19% Digital Media Player 14% Laptop
14% GPS Navigation Unit 10%
- I personally think its interesting knowing the purchase approach in an attempt
to have a picture on digital media/ads.

[iMediaConnection: Gender Marketing Web Design
Differences ]
iMediaConnection September 2006
The three main online gender differences
1. Women purchase strategically; men purchase immediately.
2. Women are cogno-emotionally placial; men are spatial.
3. Women consider other's opinions as a guide to making their own decision;
men consider others' decisions as a guide to forming their own opinions.
4. - Even though this article is more focused on the psychological difference
of men/women, its interesting to have a picture of their behavior.

Compare male purchasing strategy to female purchasing strategy when
serviceability over time is a consideration. Women want to know that today's
purchase will meet their immediate needs, mid-term and even their needs long-
term needs.
Long-term and far-term usability can even be a stronger consideration for
the female purchasing persona than immediate need.

If you know your target market is women, don't sell them on now, sell them on now (the
near bars) and again (the middle bars) and yet again (the far bars), or make sure they buy
enough so that what they buy is useful again and again and again.
- So while women are more to stick with a new product/service on the long ride, men are
more to try it right away but also tend to forget about it or stop using it first and faster.
If your target is men, make them happy now because they'll probably forget you
before the next page loads or they leave the store. This plays into branding in that
men are more difficult to brand than women in an open, competitive market.
- Joseph Carrabis, author of this article, also wrote another more recent one also about
gender difference, but more focused on a psychological fact approach. iMediaConnection
(...) What we learned in our online social network research and published was that the
easiest and quickest way to increase the size of an online social network is to get women
involved. Specifically, spikes in traffic occur two times; \"Spike #1 occurs when a female
posts an entry or comment. Spike #2 is that a woman's post or comment spurs other posts
and comments from both genders.\" - Basically when women are involved with Social
Network they tend to expand it.

[Summation: Men are from Video Games, Women are from
Social Networks ]
Summation March 2008
(...) Looking further into this trend, we believe that young men
spend as much time (and sometimes more) in front of a
computer than young women. And they have just as much free
time, if not more. But we believe the competition for their
computer time comes from spending hours playing video
games such as World of Warcraft and many first-person action
games.

Many men who play casual games tend to like games like poker with betting
involved. Since most social networks ban gambling, men find sites (most of
them offshore) that allow them to wager when they play. Women on the other
hand are large consumers of casual games and most social networks,
especially those that are dominated by third party applications, are essentially
big casual game networks.
Young women also spend much more time decorating their social network
profile pages, making slide shows, and more. Popular sites such as
Whateverlife.com exacerbate this effect by offering and catering MySpace
layouts to young women. - The main difference of online time usage its pointed
as men connection with Games and again, women with Social Network.
(...) If you are creating a new Web 2.0 site and you want to go viral, you target
women. Young women drive virality and so all the new innovation is targeted towards
them. That means that the gender gap on social networks (and increasingly in all of
social media) is only going to widen.
More and more innovation will be targeted towards women and they will continue to
get more engaged. And while we expect men’s adoption to social media to continue
to increase, it will likely be slower than the rate of adoption by women.
- Targetting women is connect with the perspective of going viral online.

Conclusion

A lot of web-based research are available on the subject \"gender\" versus
Social Network. As it showed in here, most of the results point to Women
as dominant presence online, even when Men are expected to be the first
users on new tech ventures.
Blogs are a big part of users online time and for
that, had their only share of attention. Technorati
gathered good charts and information on it,
showing that Women outcome Personal Blogs
(83%), while Men (76%); On the other hand, when
it comes to Professional blogs, you get a different
scenario: Men outcome women with 50%, when
Women have only 38% of Professional blogs
presence.

Also, while the majority of other Social Networks are mostly populated by
younger users, Blogs 91% of 25+ Women and 85% of 25+ Men over 9% of
18-24 yeard old Women and 15% of 18-24 year old Men. Therefore, its the
community to have more Ad's return (52% of US Blogs have Ads; 50% of
European Blogs have Ads; 60% of Asian Blogs have Ads), even when it a
Personal blog (53% of Personal blogs have Ads against 64% of
Professional ones).
Then, when considering the other Social Networks, many of the
websites have a young audience (14-24) and, mostly are teen
girls over teen boys. Again, with the Personal matter being the
main characteristic for Women while Men are mostly involved
on Professional basis (Myspace, Facebook, Hi5, Plaxo,
Friendster... -Women/ Linkedin, Twitter, Flickr... - Men).
It's also well observed that when it comes to older users, men
tend to develop a transition on their social presence, leaving
focused relationship Social Networks once they get married,
while women are just as present on the same situation. Dating
websites also concentrate mostly older users and Women.

It seems that, apart from a purchasing new interest developed
by Women lately, Men are still dominant on the Games universe,
spending most of their time at online games websites. Although,
again the teen girls outcome the teen boys already on this
number. Therefore, Ad's had been targeting Women through
Social Network, considering their online interest growth.
Still about online behavior, its showed that Men tend
to follow or try a new service/product faster than
Women, but also tend to forget about it just as fast.
While women take a longer time but sticks with it. Not
just that, but once Women \"approve\" it, they tend to
share with more people, therefore, they're a very
important tool to go Viral, which seems to be vital
online.

As it seems, a good tip is either targeting Women when developing a
new Social Network website or strongly considering involve them on
it!
Showed the numbers that its the closest path to online success.

References
Technorati - http://www.technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/
Mininglabs - http://www.mininglabs.com/2008/08/05/digging-through-rapleaf%E2%80%99s-
study-on-gender-and-age-in-social-networks/
BootstrapSEO - http://www.bootstrapseo.com/2008/women-in-social-networking.php
Entrepreneur - http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/178175272.html
iMediaConnection - http://www.imediaconnection.com//content//11359.asp
iMediaConnection - http://www.imediaconnection.com//content//18685.asp
Summation - http://summation.typepad.com/summation/2008/03/men-are-from-vi.html

References
Social Media Optimization - http://social-media-optimization.com/2008/04/women-
trust-blogs/
Toronto Girl Geek Dinners - http://www.torontogirlgeekdinners.ca/2008/03/will-
social-media-help-bring-more-women.html
Rapleaf - http://blog.rapleaf.com/2007/11/13/statistics-on-googles-opensocial-
platform-end-users-and-facebook-users/
PR 2.0 - http://www.briansolis.com/2008/08/introducing-conversation-prism.html

Study developed by Maisa Dabus.
All the content usage follows with the orginal links and author credits in order to follow all
the Rights requirements.
Semptember 30th of 2008.