According to yesterday's Solutions Research Group press release (2008), women "lead the social networking crowd" with 42% of online women visiting a social networking site vs 41% of men. In fairness, the previous year's survey had found only 30% of online women using social networking sites.
Blogger M.G. Seigler (ParisLemon, 2007) quoted statistics from "reputation search engine" Rapleaf last November, which seem to aggregate gender from several social networking sites - and business site LinkedIn seems to be the only one dominated by men.
I have such a hard time turning surveys like this into "real" numbers. Percentage of "online women" and percentage of "LinkedIn users" doesn't tell me much about how many people in the real world are thinking about their social networking websites on a regular basis. Basically, I think that consumer data specialists have been predicting women's adoption of social networking for so long that they jump at any trend that indicates their own prescience. It's just people-versus-objects all over again.
Now, Pew/Internet (2007) on "Teens and Social Media" gives numbers that : 21% of all teens (ages 12-17) reported using social networking messaging every day, compared to just 14% using email daily.
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4 comments:
Wait, how is 42% statistically different from 41%?
-astrogeek01 (some reason it's not letting me post with openID)
(hm, are you logged into LJ?)
Yeah, I thought that was kind of ridiculous. It looks to me like women "caught up" not "overtook" men.
However, it's possible that they're working from some other number that they're not sharing. In fact, it's a necessity, since the survey SRG is reporting got data from 1,508 online U.S. women -- which would tell you exactly bupkiss about the online habits of men.
It's Friday. I try to restrain the consumer survey data to Fridays, because the controls and reporting are not what I'd hope for.
(yeah I am. I figure it's an LJ issue. -tries again but fails-)
-ag01
(Death to LJ! Grr! In more off-topic news, did you end up subscribing to the comment feed? I'm wondering if I should post a link to that. Would other people be interested, do you think?)
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