How come Google thinks British men are so social?



Contributing Writer
Illustration: UK Flag Credit: Ian Barnard


I wrote a piece this week discussing Facebook’s efforts to (presumably) attract higher female engagement by emulating Pinterest.  The principle assumption that I made was that Pinterest was a female-dominated platform.  Gail Gardner of GrowMap read the piece and left a comment sharing that visual.ly published an infographic showing that Pinterest was dominated by men in the U.K.

I found the infographic (posted below) and read in the footnotes that the information was gleaned from Google DoubleClick Ad Planner.   So I went there and queried Pinterest audience in the U.K. and the gender breakdown was as advertised: 57% men to 43% women.  So it would appear that the assumptions that I (and many people) make about Pinterest being a female-friendly site may be incorrect….. or are they?

Just for some context I decided to query other social networks and was surprised that Google returned every one as male-dominant.  Here is a sample (US stats in parentheses)

Facebook:  59% male,  31% female  (40% m / 60% f)

Twitter: 64% male, 36% female  (40%m / 60% f)

Linkedin:  64% male, 36% female  (47% m / 53% f)

Instagram:  70% male, 30% female  (26% m / 74% f)

The counterintuitiveness of Google DoubleClick’s  U.K. social network demographics leave some question as to their validity.  One would assume given a common language and similar quality of life that there would be more congruence between social audience in the U.S. and U.K.  What visual.ly may have uncovered isn’t an anomaly for Pinterest but a problem with Google’s DoubleClick tool.

Before using Google DoubleClick to plan a targeted campaign I would seek third-party validation of their data results (not precisely, but approximately).  It seems that at least for the U.K.-specific data there is something askew in the numbers.  It would be a shame to target men in a British Pinterest campaign if they really aren’t there.

I can’t say for certain, but I suspect that social networks in the U.K. trend much more feminine than this tool indicates.  If they don’t, Google Plus must be huge there.

Visual.ly Pinterest UK
Photo Credit
Jim Dougherty

Jim Dougherty

Writer and chief of miscellany at leaderswest.com

I aspire to give people something to think about rather than tell them what to do. My favorite Google Alert is “social media research,” I am increasingly compelled by Gen Z, and I appreciate good writers agnostic of where they write. At one time I was Kred’s 12th most influential social media blogger and Klout’s most influential person on the topic of David Hasselhoff. Transplant from Seattle living in Cincinnati. Haven’t entirely adopted the local sports teams yet.

Jim Dougherty

@jimdougherty

Jim Dougherty

Jim Dougherty

Related posts

  • Pingback: How come Google thinks British men are so social? | UpSearchSEO

  • http://socialmediasun.com/ Adam Justice

    Yeah, British social media experts and bloggers (mostly male) flooded the site around the first of the year to target American women with marketing and to be an early adopter of the network. At least that’s what has been published in several studies and articles.

    Here’s a fact though: for marketing content, the home improvement, cooking, female oriented pins are much more viral than digital marketing content on Pinterest.

  • http://leaderswest.com Jim Dougherty

    Appreciate you reading and commenting, Adam! I considered whether that may be the case and determined that (since the sample size was 200K users) in order for there to be such a deviance from the US number there would have had to have been about 89,000 experts and bloggers joining Pinterest which while possible probably isn’t likely.

    That final tip is fantastic and one I hadn’t read before. You are rockin’ the house over at Social Media Sun – honored for you to stop by!

  • Pingback: How to make sense of conflicting social media research

  • Pingback: Report: Facebook losing millions of users each month (but not really)

Top