Is the Internet a Woman’s World

Which is More Dominant in Social Media, Male or Female? You will be surprised or maybe not!

Men are more positively inclined towards social media activities and use social networking sites more than women, according to what Liberty Mutual called a “comprehensive national survey” of online behavior it released yesterday. This is somewhat surprising, since it’s the exact opposite of what other surveys have found, including a recent one from Royal Pingdom that looked at user profile data from some of the major social networks. Among the findings in Liberty’s survey, which was done as part of the Responsibility Project:

• Men (57 percent) are more likely than women (50 percent) to have more than one social networking account.
• With the exception of Facebook, men are generally more likely than women to use social media accounts at least a few times per week, particularly Twitter. For MySpace, the breakdown is 35 percent of men vs. 26 percent of women; LinkedIn is 25 percent of men vs. 16 percent of women, and Twitter is 53 percent of men vs. 38 percent of women.
• Dads are more likely than moms to have a MySpace account or a Twitter account, at 43 percent vs. 29 percent and 50 percent vs. 32 percent, respectively.

The Royal Pingdom survey, meanwhile, found that of 19 social networking sites studied — including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Bebo — the majority (84 percent) had more female than male users. The exceptions to that rule were social news sites such as Digg, Reddit and Slashdot (the latter had 82 percent male users). Twitter and Facebook, meanwhile, were found to have the same proportion of male and female users — 59 percent and 57 percent respectively. The most female-dominated site was Bebo, with 66 percent female users, closely followed by MySpace and Classmates.com with 64 percent each. Royal Pingdom said the average ratio of all 19 sites was 47 percent male and 53 percent female.

Royal Pingdom’s numbers are very similar to those produced by others who have studied the issue, including Brian Solis, who put together some numbers on male-female ratios at different social networks and concluded that “In the World of Social Media, Women Rule.” So what explains the discrepancies between Liberty Mutual’s survey and the others? It could be as simple as the difference between what people say they do and what they actually do — since Liberty asked people how many networks they belonged to, whereas Royal Pingdom and others used actual data from people’s profiles. Liberty Mutual’s survey was also based on a relatively small sample size of just 1,000 people. I’ve emailed the company to ask for a comment, and will update if and when I get one.

Update:

A spokesperson for Liberty Mutual responded via email and said that the survey went out to a random sample of the population that was reflected the gender breakdown of the U.S. — 52 percent women, 48 percent men. Respondents were also screened to ensure that they had at least one social media account.

“We did not focus on the findings of how many women versus men on each network, but rather looked at data AMONG women on each network compared to data AMONG men on each network. And that is the analysis where we found men to be more active (with the exception of Facebook) – that is, more likely to say they use each network at least a few times a week, not necessarily more likely to have those accounts.”

The point of interest that’s worth review and discussion is that in Social Media, women rule.

Facebook: Male: 43% Female: 57% Delicious Male: 48% Female: 52% Docstoc Male: 41% Female: 59% Flickr Male: 45% Female: 55% Myspace Male: 36% Female: 64%

Ning Male: 41% Female: 59% Twitter Male: 43% Female: 57% Upcoming.org Male: 45% Female: 55% Ustream.tv Male: 34% Female: 66% Yelp Male: 43% Female: 57%