Surprise: Women Care Less about Business, More about Friendship!

What a surprise, really! A study released by reputation management service RapLeaf (our previous coverage) reveals that there are more women than men on all the major social networks the exception of LinkedIn and Perfspot.

RapLeaf studied over 49 million people based on the publicly available data to understand social networking trends and their relation to gender and age of internet users. The social networks studied included Bebo, Blackplanet, Classmates, Facebook, Flickr, Flixter, Friendster, Hi5, LinkedIn, Multiply, MySpace, myYearbook, Perfspot, Tickle. The 49 million of people in the selection were split between 24.8 million women, 20.6 million men while 3.9 million preferred to keep their gender to themselves. The results of the study may not be valid globally since approximately 90% of those studied profiles belonged to US residents but the results are interesting anyway.

I am not sure about my personal opinion on the results of the study. It does not make me proud of female domination of the social networking field both in terms of volume and in terms of activity. Sure, I know that I can connect to much more women on social networks but I don't really care about the gender of my social networking friend - I normally care about the topics we could discuss and the level of conversation.

But there is one thing that I find disturbing - it looks like women really have more time to spend online that they use for activities that are not connected to career or business. The proof is simple: while the majority of the websites studied are mostly about entertainment and friendship with women clearly dominating these networks, the most business-oriented network of all the social networks, LinkedIn, has much less female users than male (320 thousand versus 459 thousand).

The reasons I can see here is that probably women have not yet realized the full potential of social networking for businesses and simply are not as business-oriented by their nature as men are. So right now social networking looks more like a hobby for young women that have nothing to do offline - the most active category on all the social networks are women aged 14 to 24.

Also there is one thing that I find quite comfortable - the study shows that the crazy friendship patterns of the technology-oriented world do not repeat themselves for average users. It is not really popular to have over thousand social networking friends - out of 49 million people studied less than 200 thousand had 1,001-10,000 friends and only 2,700 users had over 10,000 friends.

And in this category of hyper-connected people I am actually pleased to see slightly more men than women - 88,246 for women versus 90,803 for men.

And that's something that I feel very good about - at least for the majority of people it has not become a necessity to befriend thousands of people and they still enjoy real friendship and communications, even online (since I believe that in the most popular group where people have 2 to 25 friends these are real-life friends actually). So it is another proof that for mainstream users social networking maintained its initial purposes and has not become a measure to build a personal brand or broadcast their business message.