MARKETING TO WOMEN

I just read about a study by Rapleaf showing that women outnumber men in social networks, and I’m not at all surprised. It’s no more than logical that women rule on social networks as they have always been more social than men. The difference between men and women is surprisingly big though; some of the major networks count 3 times as many female- than male users. Women aged 14-24 years turn out to be the biggest user group in social networks and have many more friends than others as well. This pattern could be seen in all 12 networks included in the research, except for LinkedIn, but that’s a business network of course.

An impressive 49,3 billion users were included in the study. The 14-24 years old women user group contains appr. 16 billion women, as opposed to appr. 11,5 billion men.

Rapleaf says the difference is due to the fact that women spend more time on social networks to build and nurture relationships, whereas men want transactions as well. I don’t know if that is true. What I do know from many studies is that women by nature have a much stronger focus on communication and relationships with other women, and also use many more words to work on this verbally. Social networks offer women an easy and accessible way to do what they’ve been good at for ages: being part of a social web.