Survey: 1/3 of Aussie women spend 3 hours a day on Facebook
Louisa Claire and Kellie O’Brien
A survey of Australian women has found that more than a third spend more than three hours a day on Facebook – and three in four women in business use Facebook as a marketing tool.
The survey – by MUM PR and Brand Meets Blog – also found that 60% of businesswomen now use Twitter.
Blogs are increasingly popular too – 92% of women online are reading blogs, half are running their own blog and 47% of businesswomen use blogs for marketing purposes.
They probably wouldn’t if they knew how many blogs were faked. There’s big business in fake accounts now. I run a dozen or so identities for nefarious political purposes, but others I mix with run hundreds to muddy the waters on facebook, twitter and the odd news website’s comments section. (Watching someone take over a popular hastag with twenty IDs is amusing – watching them trend a topic to number 3 in the country is a bit scary.)
Bad products magically become good, user ratings turn from 1 star to 4.5, sites containing previously bad reviews are inundated with good ones.
Marketing has infected social media in the same way it got all the others and trust will soon be killed as a result.
half of all women are running their own blog?
With 95% of respondents aged 22-49, how relevant is this research? What happened to women over 50? Did they all die? Or don’t they matter to marketers?
Research 101 – polling only those women already on social media sites quite likely to heavily skew results. Half of all women run a blog? More like half of all women who are members of the mum blogging website that undertook the research. mildly interesting but ultimately useless information
Kaye, the ‘respondents’ were aged 22-49. Not to say the other age brackets weren’t engaged in the research.
Kaye – they surveyed the women that were available via the internet who had the personality type that inclined them to answer surveys. I’m sure they would have been happy to get more data from over 50s.
Logic – the headline is inaccurate. Of the women who use the internet (and social media in particular) who are inclined to answer surveys, half of that smaller demographic have a blog. It can’t necessarily be extrapolated to be representative of all the women in Australia.
So where are the responses/respondents from other age groups?
You’re onto it Naomi – we are currently surveying 50-75 year olds online on our own website – 1100 responses so far – but when we report on these online habits we won’t extrapolate results to represent ‘all’ women or men, just the age and stage. It would also be interesting to dig down and see if respondents think posting on a social network is blogging?
Review sites, forums and blogs are the new advertising tool for both businesses and brands, because people are spending more time promoting positive (and negative) word of mouth online about products and/or services we either use or represent.
We also did a survey looking at the evolution of social media habits in Australia, which came up with some interesting statistics about how people connect with brands online:
http://bit.ly/rqWXb4
A little biased I think. Of course if your target audience are 22-49yr old women who use the Internet, this research could be useful.
I suggest looking at the latest Sensis and AGIMO research (just out ) for a broader population view of social media use.