A Look At Women in Social Media

We thought we’d provide a snapshot of some of our findings regarding women and their engagement in social media channels. To us, one of the great aspects of social media is that women are very engaged, and have played a vital role in shaping the medium as a whole. So here’s some of our findings;

Sharing Factor
Here we looked at who was more likely to “share” content across Twitter, Identi.ca, Plurk, blogs and Forums. As can be seen, women tend to share more than men, 40% more it would seem. This means sharing links, video, images and other content that they find. Sharing counts for re-tweets in microblogs and in comment sections on blogs or forums.

Frequency of Engagement
So who’s spending more time then in Social Media channels? Turns out it’s fairly equal. Our hypothesis going into this analysis was that women were likely to spend more time. Women are, but only marginally.

Response Tendency
In this case we mean how often are men or women likely to be to respond to comments or messages in microblogs. This isn’t “sharing” of content, this is responding. Women tend to respond more and would seem to be much more engaged with their channels.

Staying on Topic
Seems women are also more likely to stay on topic in a channel; mostly forums and blogs (comments) in this instance.

Conclusion
It would seem from this data that women are better at being engaged, though they are almost equal in terms of the amount of time they spend online. Much research has indicated that women tend to be more social to begin with and so this seems to be translating to social media. And social media is about human communication.

What’s your thoughts?

Methodology
For this research we looked at our aggregate data of over 200 research projects. In every research project, gender is one of the key demographics we look at along with age groups and regionalization. Here we looked at 500 samples in Twitter, Plurk, Identi.ca, 10 forums with relatively equal male/female engagement (not sports topics) and 300 blogs. Geography was USA, Canada and England. In all cases margin of error is +/-6%.