Can men compete in the Social Media gender stakes?

Michael Stelzner’s excellent social media blog, Social Media Examiner, has published the top 10 blogs in his third annual social media blog contest. The full list with links to all ten blogs is published in this post on Social Media Examiner.

It is an impressive list, I was already following some of them, others are new to me. Despite promising myself not to get distracted from getting this post published, I spent a couple of fascinating hours visiting all 10 blogs today. They are all good, all subtly or in a few cases, blatantly, different and all have good content.

In a post on 3 January “Will women dominate Social Media” while looking at the readership profile of other successful blogs, I noticed how the gender mix of most social media blogs is heavily biased towards women visitors. I wondered if it would be the same with Social Media Examiners top 10. Sure enough it is, only 1 blog, Marketing Tech Blog at #8 has a higher than average male readership. Is it because it has the word “Tech” in its name?

Before checking the audience stats on Alexa, I tried to guess which blogs would be more attractive to male readers and which to older readers. Here I was hopelessly wrong again. The one blog Hubze, which because of its dark colours and flashy design, I thought would appeal to younger, male viewers did not. It  had one of the highest over-representations of 45 to 54-year-old, primarily female visitors.

Although women made up the majority of visitors, that was not the case with the blog publishers. It seems that Heidi Cohen was the lone female publisher in the group, and interestingly, she had good support from visitors age 35 to 64 with significant appeal to the 45 to 54 group. She was one of the 3 blogs with a significant Baby Boomer following.

Very interesting.

Does this mean that us men are destined to play second fiddle in social media? Not necessarily, but it does show that women’s natural talent for networking, relationship building and caring is proving to be an advantage in the brave new world of social media.

I would highly recommend that you put these 11 blogs (including Social Media Examiner) on your lists of blogs to follow – especially if you are a male wanting to compete in an increasingly female dominated world of social media!

I would hazard a guess that next years list will have more than one female publisher.

Security tip

Observant readers will notice that I am no longer posting as “admin” which is the default user name on a new WordPress installation. It is a security weakness to use the admin user name any more than necessary and one that hackers can easily exploit.

Here are some recommended security plugins for WordPress that will help protect your blog against hackers:

WP Security Scan

WP MalWatch

WP Secure

They are all free and easy to install, search for them from your WordPress dashboard.

Wishing you success in all your endeavours.