RapLeaf: More men are Uber Connectors

When it comes to social networking, women are far more likely to be at it than men according to recent findings published by Rapleaf.

by Helen Leggatt

Rapleaf’s study across a wide range of social networking sites, involving millions of users, found that women make up the majority of users on most sites of this type.

The study also discovered that, on the whole, women had more friends on social networks than men.

"The fastest growing demographic on social networks are moms between 35 and 45 years old," writes Auren Hoffman, RapLeaf's CEO, on the company blog. "These women are putting up pictures of their kids (Johnny at baseball practice, Susie at soccer, the family in Disney World, etc.) and using these social networks (especially MySpace) to essentially make family home pages and share them with friends and relatives. They are decorating their pages, making RockYou slide shows, and using lots of widgets."

However, when Rapleaf divided male and female users into several categories based on the number of friends in each person’s network, men were more likely to be “Super Connectors” or “Uber Connectors”, ie. having numbers of friends in the thousands.

Women, on the other hand, were found to have slightly less friends in their networks yet spend more time on them. Women dominated the “Social Networkers” and “Connectors” categories, the number of friends they had ranging from 1 to around 1,000.

Rapleaf’s study appears to show that women are more likely to have smaller groups of online friends yet have a closer and more nurturing relationship with them, whereas men collect friends freely or use social networking as a business networking tool. Study findings that men were the dominant gender on LinkedIn seems to support this.