Pingdom: Majority of social sites dominated by women

Since social media became the darling of marketers, much research has been done to discover who uses it and why. Many reports point to women being the more social of the two sexes, and a recent study from Pingdom comes to a similar conclusion.

by Helen Leggatt

When Pingdom broke down the data to find the gender split between social networking and social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Digg, they found that the vast majority of sites (16 out of 19) had more female users than male.

Similar conclusions have been reached in the past by RapLeaf ('08) and FutureWorks' Brian Solis ('09).

The most female-dominated site was found to be Bebo (66%) but Classmates, MySpace, Xanga and Ning were all composed of over 60% female users.

Men dominated social news sites such as Slashdot (82% male), Reddit and Digg.

Interestingly, many commenters on Pingdom's blog entry regarding this study queried whether scammers and spambots were responsible for elevating the number of females on some social sites. Fake female personas are often used by fraudsters as they have a greater chance of being friended.

At the end of the day, whether women or men are more dominant on this site or that, the key players are the influencers. These are the people that marketers need to identify, and they come in all shapes, sizes and genders.

Tags: demographic, female, gender, male, social marketing, social media