More women use the web

I know we had our last class yesterday, but Prof. Kumar has turned me into a real 'social media junkie.' My appetite for any social media news is now insatiable(sigh).

An article on Mashable says that according to comScore (a marketing research company that provides marketing data and services to many of the Internet's largest businesses)more women than men across the world visit social networking sites and spend 30% more time per month using them. As such, in the “Women on the Web: How Women are Shaping the Internet” report, comScore concludes that women are the digital mainstream, a group of savvy Internet explorers who are more engaged than their male counterparts, and are the primary drivers of online and group buying.

Interestingly enough, comScore identifies middle-aged women, 45 plus, as the group most responsible for growth in social networking site usage. Fifteen to 24-year-olds, however, are the heaviest users and have the greatest reach. When it comes to Facebook in particular, the younger crowd use that site more than 350 minutes per month on average. That data seems to line up with an Oxygen Media study showing that more than a third of young women check Facebook first thing in the morning.

In a U.S. consumer survey conducted in April 2010, comScore asked men and women how they use Twitter. Responses demonstrate that women use Twitter more for finding deals, following celebrities and their own self-defined purposes than to post tweets or read tweets from the people they follow.

Reading all this made me remember all the tactics we discussed in class yesterday about how the organizations we profiled could use different social media platforms to reach and engage different and more diverse audiences. So, to you organizations, if the bulk of your target audience is made up of women (of all ages), you are in luck. Social media is giving you a platform - on a platter of gold, I must say, since most of the applications are free to use - to reach them.

To read the article in full, please go to http://tinyurl.com/33kaupn