Women, today, seem to be taking the lead over men in a lot of technical. Only recently it was found that working moms are the real power users of mobile phones.
The latest statistics, collected by Brian Solis of Google Ad Planner, and published on Information is Beautiful, show that women also dominate the social web.
While the numbers seem to be more or less equal on a few of the social sites like LinkedIn, DeviantArt and YouTube, it has been found that the men are far outnumbered by the number of women on most of the other sites like Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter, MySpace etc.
The percentages of women using some of the popular social sites are as follows:
| Social Network | % Female Users |
|---|---|
| Digg | 36% |
| 50% | |
| YouTube | 50% |
| deviantART | 50% |
| del.icio.us | 52% |
| Hi5 | 54% |
| Flickr | 55% |
| FriendFeed | 55% |
| 57% | |
| 57% | |
| Ning | 59% |
| Gaia online | 61% |
| Classmates.com | 64% |
| MySpace | 64% |
| Buzznet | 64% |
| Tagged | 64% |
| Bebo | 68% |
The only site on which men were found to outnumber women was Digg, which has 4.7 million more men (64% of the user base).
While there will definitely be those who say that women dominate the social Web because women often have more time to spend on unimportant matters, like chatting with their friends, because more women stay at home all the time as compared to the number of men, it is also very possible that women spend more time on social networks than men because they are the ones who really care about people and like to nurture and strengthen relationships.
Whatever the reasons for this difference, these demographics will certainly be very useful to marketers, as they give a very good indication of what sort of products and campaigns should be displayed on the social networks in order to get good conversion rates.
