Women dominate social networking

MUMBAI:

A comeScore global online usage survey reveals that more women visit social networking sites than men. Among online users above 15 years, while the reach by women in May was 75.8 per cent, the reach for men was 69.7 per cent. In the Asia-Pacific region too, women (54.9 per cent) exceeded men (50.7 percent).

"We have seen that women across the globe share some similar usage patterns online, such as strong engagement with social networking sites," said Linda Boland Abraham, comScore chief marketing officer and EVP, global Internet, women spend about eight per cent more time online, averaging 25 hours per month on the web.

comScore's survey shows that women spend 30 per cent more time on social networking sites than men. Although women account for 47.9 per cent of unique visitors to the social networking category, they consume 57 per cent of pages and account for nearly 57 per cent of total minutes spent on these sites.

Women average 5.5 hours per month on social networking sites compared to men's four hours.

Interestingly, according to a ViziSense report on the online behaviour of women in India, women spend the most time on search, e-mail and social networking (in that order). Online shopping does not even features among the top seven categories of websites accessed.

Social networking is the most accessed by women aged 15-24. Single women are the largest user group across all access categories, accounting to 62 per cent of page views for social networking sites.

While online usage is skewed in the ratio of 61 per cent in favour of south Indian women, when it comes to social networking their counterparts in north India are far more active.

Although e-mail access is higher in terms of unique women visitors, page views for social networking are far higher, the survey found. "Social networking getting more page views than e-mail categories is a great insight, indicating the shift of e-mail conversations to social networking sites in the form of internal messages, chats and wall postings.

"Our findings are based on the actual behaviour of a sample of 2,200 women panelists," said Amit Bhartiya, GM, ViziSense.