How important is audience gender to social media planning for nonprofits?

During your continued use of social media for nonprofit fundraising, a certain amount of your time should be reserved for analysis, reporting and studying your current strategies and reviewing results.

Understanding demographics does of course have significant value although my initial thought in terms of gender is that 100% of your audience will fall into one of just two categories. So just how important is knowing the gender of different social media users and how they use the most popular platforms?

Today I write about an interesting study/infographic about gender and social media use that I wanted to point you towards featured on exacttarget.com that is well worth consideration and it also answers many of these questions.

Naturally there is some value to this information particularly if your nonprofit’s existing or target donor audience would predominantly be male or female. If logic and/or past performance suggests that 75% of your donor audience is female then there will be inherent value in focusing social media efforts in a direction where that audience can be more naturally reached. Alternately if your organization is looking to find new donors in a currently unequal balance in your donor audience this would be good knowledge to have. As ever, I feel that each organization develops a very unique audience over time – so gauging how your overall audience best engages with social media should remain a priority with gender information perhaps being an additional layer of consideration once you’ve isolated where your strategies are currently succeeding.

So let’s take a look at some of the data about gender and social media use based on a study of US audiences. Men reading this should take warning, women lead in most categories.

Overall use of social media – As the image above demonstrates women are more active than men on five of the six leading social media platforms holding large leads on Facebook, Tumblr and Pinterest. The results are closer on Instagram with only Twitter being vaguely close to truly being representative of the overall population in terms of user equality. LinkedIn is the only platform where men are likely to be more active. Frequency of social media use is an important concern too and here again women lead with 30% saying they use social media ‘several times per day’ versus 26% of men.

Interaction and consumption – Knowing what tasks people are more likely to do on social media in terms of brands/companies and organizations is at the heart of this data for our purposes. If you visit the link provided above you can see this visually and once again women lead the way. Overall interaction with brands:

• Showing Support – Women 54% | Men 44%
• Accessing Offers – Women 53%| Men 36%
• Staying Current – Women 39% | Men 33%
• Commenting – Women 28% | Men 25%

Originally many people considered social media to be primarily an avenue for friendships and sharing photos or personal updates but increasingly it has become a huge source of news for many. Based on Facebook, the study reveals that 58% of women ‘consumed news via social media’ compared to just 42% of men.

Going Mobile – You’ll already know that the transition toward website views / social media views on mobile devices is a hot topic as it has been migrating for a few years. In fact many websites are seeing daily visits from mobile devices approaching 30% or more of all page views which is stunning when you consider it was around 5% only three or four years ago, these ratios are even more pronounced for social media with Facebook nearing 45% via mobile devices. The report also shows that women are driving this change with both smartphones and tablets more likely to be used for their social media access and interaction than by men.

Overall that’s really important data to be considered, particularly when you measure this against your current donor audience and ongoing strategies. Facebook already allows you to view your audience demographics, you can learn more on my earlier post ‘Getting the most from Facebook Insights’ and there are a number of (paid) services that do the same for Twitter. With LinkedIn and other platforms you can conduct good sample research yourself quite easily. As always though I recommend to not just focus on total ‘followers’ but give your added consideration to who is engaging with your nonprofit.
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Miratel Solutions is a Toronto call centre, eBusiness, and letter shop mail house specializing in professional fundraising services including telephone fundraising, online fundraising, lottery services, donation caging, donation processing and other donor management services. We are committed to our CSR business values in all contact centre services