Tipping and Trends

The trend that I thought was the most interesting was the amount of time women spent on social networking sites versus men. Women spent one out of every six minutes that they were online on social networking sites in December. Not only was that interesting, but it was up 4.5% from the year before. The article put it best "So women not only spend more of their time on these sites than men, but they are also accelerating their usage at a faster rate".

The reason this was interesting to me is because from my very casual, non-scientific observations I would have thought it was about the same. When I look at my friends and who spend the most time online, I do not think that there is an overwhelming trend that my female friends are online more than my guy friends. What this means from a business standpoint is that the "social media market" is going to continue to be saturated with female users over males. Adapting strategies to capitalize on that would be extremely smart.

The Tipping Point brief was interesting because it put into words trends that we all see happening around us, but may not have been able to explain. I have seen a couple smaller "epidemics" that just reached their tipping point and it really did come down to a few key people. How this applies to social media is the example of MySpace. It was awesome for a while and everyone had one, heck, some people had two or three accounts. But then it died. It was overrun by a new epidemic called Facebook. The question I pose is whether or not FaceBook will be able to avoid the same fate myspace has? Yes more adults and more businesses have a FaceBook, but when will it quit being cool, and just kind of fade away?

Thats all for now folks!