Women Are Word of Mouth

A recent post by Socialmediatoday.com did a nice job of bringing together some new studies that reinforce the importance of women in social media.  It’s not surprising to see that women are more active on social networks than are men.

The latest research from Royal.pingdom.com shows that across 19 social media sites, there were more female users than men on 16 out of the 19 most popular sites.

Here are some interesting facts:

• Twitter and Facebook have approximately the same male-female ratio:  Twitter is 59 percent female and Facebook is 57 percent female.
• The average ratio of all 19 sites was 47 percent male, 53 percent female.
• The most female-dominated sites are Bebo (66 percent female users), MySpace and Classmates.com (64 percent female users).

The three sites with more male users are functional, news related sites – Digg, Reddit and Slashdot.

So why is this female user important?  She’s the consumer, the connector and the decision maker for most of the purchase decisions in the family.

But more important to marketers, women are three times more likely to share personal stories with a friend than men.  Evidently, women are hard-wired that way – with more actual brain activity for bonding and connecting with others.

When we need a recommendation, we tend to ask our friends for their hairdresser, the dentist they go to, their favorite stores and what book they read last.

The multiple effect of a women’s Twitter or Facebook account has important implications for marketers.  The average Facebook user has 130 friends.  The more followers you have on Twitter, the most Tweets per day.  Twenty-one percent of online women tweet.

But remember, marketers, women want information that is important, authentic and personal to them.  Their age, their lifestage and their lifestyle are important indicators of how to address them.