Friends of Men vs. Women on Social Networks

San Francisco, CA - April 30, 2008 -- Men tend to be more transactional and less relationship building when it comes to their friends on social networks. Women tend to have slightly more friends on average.

In the largest social networking study ever done, Rapleaf sampled over 30 million people looking at social graph information across various social networks including Bebo, Facebook, Friendster, Hi5, LiveJournal, Myspace, Flickr, and others. We looked at the number of friends that women have vs. men across these social networks. The following are highlights of the information we extracted:

• Rapleaf sampled 30.74 million people with at least 1 friend
• Of the people with at least 1 friend, 53.57% are female and 46.43% are male
• Social Networkers (1-100 friends):
  
  • ~80% of the sample set
  • Women have on average 62 friends
  • Men have on average 57 friends
  • Women are more likely to be Social Networkers
• Connectors (100-1000 friends):
  
  • ~19% of the sample set
  • Women have on average 185 friends
  • Men have on average 172 friends
  • Women are more likely to be Connectors
• Super Connectors (1000-10000 friends):
  
  • 0.66% of the sample set
  • Women have on average 1,837 friends
  • Men have on average 1,944 friends
  • Men are more like to be Super Connectors
    
• Uber Connectors (10000+ friends):
  
  • 0.02% of the sample set
  • Women have on average 24,077 friends
  • Men have on average 24,584 friends
  • Men are more likely to be Uber Connectors

Our analysis:

As per Rapleaf's original study [link], women spend more time on social networks. While the full data below demonstrates that women do have slightly more friends than men on social networks, the difference isn't substantial.

While we theorize that women spend more time on social networks, building and nurturing relationships, we also theorize that 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.

Full in-depth report: