Hamey

How do you make a social network successful? Girls. An acquaintance of mine from China mentioned a curious (but logical) phenomenon in Chinese social networks.  The developers openly market them almost exclusively for girls, knowing that the guys will follow.  After all, looking at it from a evolutionary perspective we know that women are far more social beings than men, and we know that men tend to gravitate to women, so it makes rational sense.  Metrics on social networks support this theory as well, according to Pew Internet 70% of girls (age 15-17) have created and used a social networking profile whereas only 54% of boys in the same bracket have used a social network.  There are a lot of girls only (or girl marketed) social networks cropping up too - Flip.com released beta invitations exclusively to girls and sites like teamsugar are very squarely aimed at girls. The big players don’t seem to have a heavy bent either way, but it would be interesting to know how Facebook and Myspace features are used by girls and guys differently, e.g. is “The Wall” used on Facebook more than private messaging for a particular sex?  Regardless, if you are starting a social network it isn’t such a bad idea to aim for girls first.