Women make friends online, men collect contacts

May 5, 2008 by Dirk Singer

This is according to data management and search firm Rapleaf, which trawled through 30 million profiles of people with at least one online friend on social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Flickr, and LiveJournal.

Looking at people with between 1-100 online friends (so called social networkers), women had on average 62 friends and men five fewer – 57. For people with 100-1000 friends, men had on average 172 and women 185.

According to the report, “Men are less likely to spend as much time nurturing relationships as they are acquiring relationships from a transactional standpoint.

“Spending less time on a social network but transacting more equates to having roughly the same number of friends as women, who spend more time on social networks, but are busier sustaining relationships.”

This confirms other research – and something that marketers increasingly need to be aware of – that the dominant group online isn’t spotty teenage boys. But young women.

Photo – Inju, under a creative commons license.