April 18, 2016
by Dafyd Martindale
James Brown’s 1966 R&B classic “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” may or may not still ring true in 2016.
But when it comes to Facebook in the South Burnett, it seems to be largely a woman’s world.
In fact, according to a study we conducted recently across 20 different local Facebook pages with a combined 7000 followers, women now outnumber men on the South Burnett’s Facebook pages by a ratio of almost three to one.
It was easy to find this out because once any Facebook page attracts enough likers, Facebook’s “Insights” feature will provide a breakdown of who that page’s visitors are by age and sex.
We decided to look at the Insights of the 20 pages we’d chosen for our study to see if we could get any insights ourselves.
Now, most of the pages we used for our study are of purely local interest but some – for major festivals – attract many hundreds of followers from outside our region.
However, we know the overwhelming majority of the various people who visit these Facebook pages live here.
So we thought the combined Insights data we used for our quick study would provide a reasonably good snapshot of what seems to be going on with Facebook in our region right now.
And what we found surprised us.
The first surprise was that, on average, 75 per cent of local Facebook users are women and 25 per cent are men.
And the second was that while the spread of age groups amongst the local male audience was fairly even and the disparity between the sexes seemed least in the 18-24 and 65-plus age categories (though women still outnumber men in both), the biggest single cluster of female users were women aged between 35 and 44, where they appeared to outnumber men of the same age by a jaw-dropping 5-1 ratio.
Which got us asking: why?
Why in a real world where the the split between the sexes is roughly 50/50 is the South Burnett’s Facebook a 75/25 world?
What is it about Facebook that makes it so much more attractive to women than it appears to be to men?
Is this peculiar to our region, or is it a more widespread phenomenon?
And why, in a real world where the ages of male followers appear to be split almost equally across all Facebook’s age brackets, are the bulk of female followers clustered in the 35-44 bracket?
Well, we’ll ‘fess up right now – we don’t really have any answers.
But that’s how Facebook’s world looks to us in mid-2016.
