Do Women Care More About Social Networks?
Interesting snippet of the day: Auren Hoffman recently blogged about the growing imbalance between male and female participation in social networks. To boil it down, the most popular social networking sites - Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Plaxo, and Hi5 - are roughly 60:40 female:male. Auren theorizes that the sole exception, LinkedIn (61% male) has the reverse skew because it is highly transactional, unlike the other networks. I can see his point.
Rapleaf calculated the study based upon analysis of its (surprisingly large) user base of 13.2 million, so of course there's a large caveat here that we don't know what Rapleaf's own gender skew is. e.g., if women care more about reputation - and given social norms, it's entirely possible that they do - then these numbers will be off. Your thoughts?
You mean 60:40 female:male, I think, Christine?
Posted by: Luke Razzell | April 04, 2008 at 11:42 PM
Um, yes. Thanks for catching my typo!
Posted by: Christine | April 05, 2008 at 09:45 AM
Social networking ala facebooking is alot about building and nurturing relationships which traditionally is more (not exclusively) associated with women. However, I'd be interested to see if there is an age difference in addition to gender differences. I suspect the younger kids embrace it more equally.
Posted by: Fran Maier | April 06, 2008 at 09:35 AM
Either Rapleaf has a ton of widgets operating, more sites than rapleaf trustfuse, and upscoop that I missed, the term "users" is not quite right, or ... ?
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/rapleaf.com+upscoop.com+trustfuse.com/?metric=uv
Posted by: Scott Rafer | April 06, 2008 at 12:55 PM
Either Rapleaf has a ton of widgets operating, more sites than rapleaf trustfuse, and upscoop that I missed, the term "users" is not quite right, or ... ?
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/rapleaf.com+upscoop.com+trustfuse.com/?metric=uv
Posted by: Scott Rafer | April 06, 2008 at 12:57 PM
Yep Scott, you called it - they're culling data from the folks on Facebook that have added UpScoop/Rapleaf etc to their profiles.
Posted by: Christine | April 20, 2008 at 12:54 PM
non-profit leadership development training, which in many ways (the way we do it) is personal, networking-oriented, social and challenging to the ego, skews 60:40 female as well. hmmm.....
Posted by: andre carothers | May 03, 2008 at 03:05 PM
I also took a shot at writing about this: http://alanataylor.blogspot.com/2008/04/from-miss-i-dont-know-to-miss-20.html
Posted by: Alana Taylor | May 04, 2008 at 10:16 AM
I find that on my twitter I have more females then males, but the males are quite vocal...
@sunshinetalia
Posted by: Talia | May 06, 2008 at 05:08 PM