Are Boyfriends Are More Popular Than Girlfriends In Social Media?

I ran across this article by GoChime on analyzing Data on the Internet.  Give it a read and wonder what job and career you are going to be involved with.

In our business we come across a lot of interesting data points about what people are talking about social media. Data that make us think, laugh, or wonder. Starting this week, our plan is to begin sharing some of those interesting stories with you on a regular basis.

For instance, we were recently working on a campaign for which we needed to identify people expressing ownership in the context of family and relationships in social media. That is, people talking about their own mother, father, sister, brother, girlfriend, boyfriend, grandma, uncle, and so on.

Our Intent Mining Dashboard tracks the relative volume of mentions for each member of the family or relationship, so we could quickly see the breakdown as we worked. The engine behind it is able to determine the difference between people just mentioning the word “mom” and people talking about their own mom, so that makes this pretty interesting.

Overall, we’ve observed that men are more frequently mentioned in conversations about significant others (Husbands/Boyfriends) while women are much more frequently the subject of conversations about family (parents/grandparents).

We think its appropriate to see Mom top the list of most frequently discussed members of your family in social media. People are talking about the Mom in social media more than any other member of their family including Dad, husband, wife, girlfriend, and boyfriend. Dad took second place (same was the case for Grandpa versus Grandma).

But, the twist for us was in Mom’s margin of victory over Dad. People talk about their Mom in social media almost three times as much as Dad.

Point: Moms (and Grandmas)

So, Mom definitely wins that one, but let’s take a look at who she and Dad talk about the most when it comes to their kids: Sons or Daughters. This one is a little bit of a closer call, but the boys still win this round. Sons are 54% more likely to be discussed than Daughters.

Point: Sons.

However, if we take a look at how much the siblings are discussing each, Brothers and Sisters, we find that they actually discuss each other equally. The difference in conversation volume was so minimal that we’ll call it a draw between Brothers and Sisters.

Tie: Brothers & Sisters

Looking to husbands and wives, it’s very close. Husbands are talked about more frequently than Wives in social media. The margin of difference isn’t as great as with Moms and Dads though. Husbands are only 0.2 times as likely to be discussed as Wives.

Point: Husbands.

We see lots of conversation in social media about dating, so we wanted to see who’s dominating the mentions in social media. It turned out to be no contest: boyfriends are discussed 2.6 times more frequently than girlfriends.

Point: Boyfriends

Looks like girls and guys with a boyfriend are much more eager to openly discuss their relationships in public – but that’s not much of a shocker, is it? Social Media is often a very accurate (and measurable) mirror of our culture.

That’s part of why we love what we do. We learn so much about ourselves by studying how people express intent, ownership, and interests in social media. And now, we’re excited to start sharing more of our learnings with you.

This round was an analysis based purely on volume extracted right off the top of our usual campaign creation process. We’re actually able to go much deeper into these conversations to mine conversations for deeper insights. If we took this a layer deeper, we’d want to see what’s driving the conversation for each family member. The overwhelming volume of people talking about their Moms could simply be driven by angsty teens complaining. Suddenly, we would have another story on our hands.