Chris Brogan threw the gauntlet, proposing 100 topics he hopes other bloggers will write, and as this blog is struggling to find a voice distinct from my former writings, I took him up on his challenge.
HOW WOMEN USE SOCIAL MEDIA
The simple answer to the question is: I don’t really know. Out of the 6 billion people on Earth, more than half are women, and their patterns of interaction with the world around them are as different as their size, shape, hair or eye color. But as a woman who embraced blogs early on, twitters madly and has been doing so for more than a year, and is using Facebook to keep tracks of her friends, I believe I can venture some answers.
1. Women = more
Check your Facebook friends. The likelihood of them being predominantly women is extremely high, and a Business Week article explains why. In brief: there are more women aged 30+ online than there are men, married men tend not to join social networks whereas married women do, and when online, men are biased towards transactional behavior, rather than the relationship-building that such networks are predicated on. The figures come from a Rapleaf study of social network users, and the gender and site by site breakdown is revealing, albeit US centric.
2. Women = later
In the last report I’ve seen of women versus men online, it was made clear that the innovators and most of the early adopters of new online technologies are still men, although that may be a little bit dated. The trend was towards narrowing this gap, and of course, women made up in numbers what they lacked in intensity and speed of adoption. I’d be interested in seeing an update on the Pew research, though.
3. Women = broader
Most data on online behavior, as well as my private experience, is that women’s use of social media encompasses larger segments of their life than men’s use. Thus, women frequently use social media to share personal news, whereas men prefer business connections, and they are also more attuned to the events and changes in their network, which they actively seek out and react to, than men are. Much of that is related to staying power: men can join an online network at the spur of the moment, and never keep up their membership, whereas women, once online, tend to cultivate their presence. This, of course, is opinion, but i bet it won’t be long until it’s validated by research.
Posted under Random opinion
This post was written by Corina on October 7, 2008
