An interesting report on social media usage trends throughout Europe.
The bottom line?
1. Internet usage is still largely task-based. News consumption, research & information gathering prior to purchase and staying in touch with friends are the most frequent activities.
2. We research EVERYTHING - from snack foods to holidays - online.
3. Comfortable strangers. The fabric of our social network is changing significantly. In the UK, for example, people stay in touch "face-to-face" with 21.4 people, while they stay in touch online with 49.3 people.
So what about women and social media?
It's definitively a new matriarchy! See "Information is beautiful"
Women now outnumber men on:
Facebook: 57 percent women users.
Twitter: 57 percent women users.
Flickr: 55 percent women users.
When we look at the influence of social media on Generation-Y women's behavior (view the stats here), we see exactly how powerful a communication tool social media networks are becoming...!
Thursday
Social media: the new matriarchy?
Monday
Much ado about what women want - online.
There's much ado about marketing to women online at the moment.
Articles on what women do (and don't do) online, what's lacking and who's being left out. It seems there is still quite a way to go before we agree we have it figured out.
The article "Men are from Facebook, women are from Twitter", published on CNNMoney.com talks about the different ways in which men and women use the internet. Reading it left me disappointed - some very stereotypical general top-level findings that boil down to "a little bit of this, a little bit of that and a lot of nothing".
Then there was this article about Women over 50 using the internet as primary news source (yup, my mom included!)
The article that raises the most interesting point is this one, by Wall Street Journal columnist Christina Binkley. In it Binkley asks:
"Are online marketers so youth-conscious -- because it feels right -- that they're ignoring lucrative markets just when they're most needed? The Internet is neither new nor young. The fastest-growing segment of Facebook users is women over 55, according to the Tracking Facebook blog. And the underlying assumption that young people are still the Web's most fertile market doesn't hold up to scrutiny."
Food for thought this week!
