Commentary
Foursquare Needs Women? Just Wait A Few Years
- by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, August 2, 2010
Last week brought a report from Forrester suggesting that Foursquare, a leader in location-based social networks, is disproportionately male, with a male-female ratio of nearly four-to-one. As one might expect, this excited some comment in online forums. In addition to potentially discouraging single men from joining, much of the buzz around these findings seemed to imply, in a vague buzz-y way, that the lack of ladies -- or glut of guys, I guess -- somehow bodes ill for Foursquare's future as a marketing platform.
I have two (not necessarily consistent) observations about this: First, why should a site's gender proportions matter to marketers? Second, the proportions will probably adjust to be more reflective of the general population over the next couple years, as Foursquare's head of business development, Tristan Walker, has already suggested.
On the first point, the gender make-up of a social network's user base, as with any audience, really only matters to marketers in that they need to make sure they are targeting the right people in the right place. Virtually every other medium delivers audiences that are at least sometimes segmented by gender -- e.g. Maxim vs. Glamour, Spike vs. Lifetime -- so why shouldn't some online social networks?
Moving on to the second, somewhat contradictory point, I doubt the alleged gender imbalance will be a lasting phenomenon, judging by the historical development of the Internet over the last two decades. The same trend has been evident pretty much everywhere you look: each new online activity has been dominated at first by a relatively small number of young, affluent, tech-savvy men, but the proportion of women rises rapidly as the activity scales up.
I'll throw out a handful of examples, starting with the Internet itself, where the proportion of women in the U.S. online population rose from a mere 5% in 1994 to 39% in 1998 and 51% now, according to various figures from Pew and Georgia Tech. Zooming in on specific activities, check out online shopping: in 2000 45% of all online shoppers were female, rising to 51% in 2008, according to figures from Pew and Greenfield Online. Or online banking: in 2001 19.3% of male Internet users said they used online banking, compared to 16.5% of female Internet users. Just four years later, adoption by the two genders was equal at 41% each.
Erik Sass is editor of Publishers Daily. You can reach Erik at eriksass@gmail.com.
Very insightful...
For a woman in business, whose forte is sports related food products - football helmet shaped items such as pizza, chocolate chip cookie-cakes,
GameDay hot wings and more - Foursquare is a gift from God! Who wouldn't want more men to target their products to. Count me in! Just go to MyrnaRae.com and you'll see what I mean.
Selling to Kroger and other supermarkets nationally is a "score" any new manufacturer would want, but when the real buyer is generally women, and they don't fully understand the importance of collegiate or pro football for the entire year and are stuck in an archaic buying cycle that the only time football is important to celebrate is during the bowl games, then you have to reach the real market - men! - to educate their women on the fun of the entire season.
With over twenty million - yep, that's right - 20,000,000 youth playing football and also cheer supporting football - moms and dads need to know of the fun food products to entertain their kids - win or lose.
I would love to tap into a massive male audience. My UltimateTailgateParty.com website touts even more products than seen on MyrnaRae.com. Celebrating forty years in business with such famous clients as NFL, Anheuser Busch and more, this social media company makes our connection a "dream team".
Point me in the direction and I will quickly become the social quarterback of the media marketing for Foursquare.
Myrna Rae
At a gut level, I doubt the lag in adoption has as much to do with general trends as it does the genuine (and at times, inflated) concern for women about broadcasting our location and activities, possibly inviting unwanted "company" or worse.
I think the gender balance will come quickly when location based services can figure out a simple, effective privacy layer that allows us to share information with trusted contacts, while still preserving the fun and social aspects they already do so well.
Foursquare is marketed as having general audience appeal, and in this light a 4-to-1 imbalance is, well, pretty unbalanced. (Your gender bias is showing that you don't view this as a problem!) Maxim, Glamour, Spike, Lifetime -- all intentionally segmented by gender, so not relevant comparisons. A similar imbalance was not evident in the early days of online banking (2001 OLB Males to Females ratio = 54/46, not 80/20 which would have been 4-to-1). Remains to be seen whether Foursquare's imbalance will adjust organically over time as the application matures, but if I were Tristan Walker, I'd at least be asking myself what it about Foursquare's initial value prop leaves so many women saying, Meh.
@ Karri Carlson ... excellent post pinpointing Privacy and the need to deflect unwelcome male attention (read: Stalkers) as a key Female concern ... ! Rather than shrug off the gender imbalance as something that will simply right itself over time, Foursquare needs to be paying attention.
More then likely the reason "most" women do use Foursquare is for safety as Karri stated - I certainly would not want my wife using it.
But then again there are many reason one would as the very excited Myrna showed us. So as with all things - some will and some won't - you just need enough that will.
The 4-1 balance will probably sort itself out as the value proposition is defined for women just as stated above. It's an important fact to follow given that 70% of the women are the primary shoppers in the household. 4Square obviously hasn't communicated its value prop to women well. Given that I am one of the 20% that uses 4 square, I have to admit. I haven't figured out how to use it and more importantly its value to me.
This is hard for me to believe as I am currently producing a Foursquare driven scavenger hunt for FIJI Water in Chicago and I would say that our sign ups have been 50/50 male to female.
Maybe it has to do with the nature of the event, or our location, but we've noticed that a lot of females use Foursquare and love it!
http://www.theurbanhunt.com
http://www.twitter.com/fijihunt
Speaking of male/female ratios in Foursquare, I launched a site that focuses on this data in a unique way...Assisted Serendipity notifies you when the male/female ratio tips in your favor at any bar/club/coffee shop near you:
http://www.assistedserendipity.com/
I've seen solid traction from both sexes, and I've also heard from the PR people at Foursquare that the actual ratio of Foursquare users is closer to 60/40.
Just for the record, women don't liked to be stalked and FourSquare seems to open that creaky door...
@Pamela - totally agree - if this issue isn't someone's sole mission at 4Square, they're seriously missing the boat. I truly believe that LBS are a huge disruptive force (and I mean that in a positive way!) for online media, online and offline commerce, and content sharing. To accept that women can't/won't/don't want to participate would be an epic failure of imagination - not to mention product marketing!