The Social Media Gender Gap

(page 2 of 2)

LinkedIn is all about gathering intelligence and making introductions. We expect men to keep gravitating to transactional sites, such as those that make gaining access to news, sports, and financial information easier.

Women's behavior online, on the other hand, is less transactional and more relationship-driven. They spend more time on social networks building relationships, communicating with friends, and making new friends. Married women use social networks to share pictures and treat their network profiles as family home pages to share with friends and relatives. And because they use social networks to be social, a dollar spent marketing to acquire a female user goes a lot further than on a male user.

Thanks to these realities, expect social networks of the future to keep catering to women and all but alienate men. Just take a look at RockYou and Slide, providers of two dominant photo widgets. These sites are clearly targeting young women, down to the fact that they're designed with traditional feminine colors (i.e., purple and pink), littered with glitter, and almost exclusively adorned with pictures of women. They barely give men lip service. Both companies do have a few niche Facebook applications that target men, but the fact that these applications are hidden and often marketed under different brands proves women rule this space. And from this thought experiment, it is not hard to predict future hits. We'll see an interactive version of Oprah and some sort of choose-your-own-adventure soap opera.

More Women Execs?

So what does this mean? To capitalize on this trend, we'll see a rise in female hires in the social media world. Given how important women are to the industry, it's amazing how few female executives there are at the companies and venture capital firms targeting this market. It's almost as if Procter & Gamble (PG) and Clorox (CLX) only employed male brand managers. This will change soon.

And because social media are so much more "in tune" with women, male audiences will be increasingly seen as less valuable than female ones. We already know that women spend more and make more purchasing decisions than men, and women seem to be more likely to tell their friends about their purchases—so an advertiser will get a double benefit from female consumers.

Perhaps Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus had it right. Mars, the god of war, is all about individual glory, so we'll see sites catering to men become more focused on "me." Venus, the god of love, is all about working with others, and we'll see social networks cater to women by focusing on "us."

Find more data from the social media study.

Auren Hoffman is CEO of Rapleaf, a company that collects and analyzes publicly available people data from the Internet.