05.09.08
Social Media is a Girl’s World
Posted in Best Practices, Social Media, Web Business at 7:59 am by Mosey
Long, long ago in the annals of time, like, oh 2004 or so, the female was a rare thing on the internet. Chat rooms, forums, blogs, probably had a 4:1 ratio of men to women. It came from the industry itself, the geekette was rare in the server room, and web staffs were usually sausage parties. Boys did tech, girls did marketing, that is just how it was.
And so, an entire generation of websites grew up catered more to men than women. Fark.com, collegehumor.com, homestarrunner.com, most of the popular share and watch sites were very male orientated. Oxygen.com went kaput fast, iVillage.com pretty much a bust.
It isn’t that people weren’t trying, there was a line back in the day for “women based sites.” But when the most popular non-mainstream news site is slashdot, which is around 80% male, it is an uphill battle. WebMd survived its softer side approach, and they were the exception.
Behold! The days of real social networking, friendly and easy to use, where you can chat real time, and alert friends. Dare I say it, virtually gossip about photos and relationships. Yes, it is a stereotype, but so is fart jokes and car crashes which the last generation was built on.
Milissa Rick of Spark Effect quotes a couple of demographic studies showing that when it comes to social media, it is a girl’s world. Back in March the London Times (by way of Mashable) reported that girls have larger social network numbers than boys. Across the board, age group to age group women are on the social networks, blogging, chatting more than men, about 10% more. This was confirmed again in the adage article on social media personality types. 10-12, 13-15, 20-30, 40-50… all the same gap, About 10% more women than men on social media sites, blogging, sharing.
I’ll let you create your own stereotype on “why” for now, what I want to focus on is “so?”
That “so what” is what drives any good site or idea when they hear a statistic. If there are more women than men, pretty much regardless of age, on the social media train, then you probably should gear your content to match that. Now maybe men are still on the above mentioned sites (none of which are going broke) and social media is just the new realm of women, but I think it is more. Yes, there are bored housewives and teenage girls looking to connect, why would there be fewer of them than men? But why more?
If you own a social networking platform, figure it out because it is going to be the key to your success. I am not saying pink layouts and flowers on every Bebo-clone home page but that the old mindset of men-on-the-net-because-they-are-geeks is dead.
You design and develop for your demographic and that is slanting 10% more female now than male these days (and growing). There certainly is a different usability, language tone, palette, application when you put things under that light. Stereotype or not there is a reason the same damn razor is marketed to women different than men (black background, really?). You have to keep in mind that if you have a social product, without an inherent gender bias (i.e. motor oil social blog) the majority of your users will be female.
That said, if there is one thing that has been true since the dawn of time, proven at every ale house, coffee shop, home economics class and dating site of all time is that where there are more women than men, men will show up. Usually drunk and being loud and rude. There, my stereotypes are even.
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Web Success Diva said,
May 9, 2008 at 11:42 am
Great insight into nuances of social media that will ultimately affect the results marketers get. Thank you.
Maria Reyes-McDavis