We are all aware that social networks, social marketing, social media and just plan old being social are the new wave regarding the Internet and its magical powers to make the world a better place for all. As we move further along in the life cycle of this still relatively new phenomenon (OK, all of you folks who have ‘been doing this for years’ can huff and puff at this point) there will be more opportunity to slice and dice the nature of the social network and the networkers that inhabit them. The folks over at Pingdom have taken a stab at looking at the gender breakdown of this group and found that women rule. Kinda. 84% (16 out of 19) of the sites have more female than male users. The social news sites Digg, Reddit and Slashdot have significantly more male users than female. The standout here is Slashdot which takes male geekdom to new heights with 82% male users. If we hadn’t included the three social news sites, all of the sites would have had more females than males. Twitter and Facebook have almost the same male-female ratio; Twitter with 59% female users and Facebook with 57%. Now we need to apply the classic question that all marketers must eventually apply to statistics and sales presentations: So what? But before we go there we can’t waste the very nice chart that the Pingdom folks put together for you to look at. I suspect that these ratios may always hold true to some degree but as there are more an more business applications of social media they may balance out a bit depending on the situation. Easy for me to say, sure. Honestly, social media is just like a very other tool that is used to reach people for a specific reason. Knowing how many is neat but the more important question is why someone is there. Certain networks may attract more of one gender over another for reasons that will then truly tell a marketer what the value of that network may be to them. And of course, just because it is that way now is no assurance that it will remain that way. So Pilgrims, as you awake from your tryptophan induced haze what is your take on the various guys and girls clubs in the social networking space?
