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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Women on Social Nets Want It All…for Free Depending on whether they look at a glass half empty or half full, brand marketers and publishers may be disappointed or heartened to discover that only 45% of women go to the nets to research products or services. On the key points of intersections between publishers’ content and social nets, getting advice from others and finding deals or discounts, only 31% and 25% of women, respectively, considered these activities very important in the social environment. The state of mind and expectations users bring to different online environments cannot be underestimated. Traditionally, advertising and even media have not performed very well in social networks because members really are here to interact with one another. The numbers from ShesConnected—a new social network targeting women—bear this out, at least when looking at the relatively low importance women put on non-social activity in these areas. They are in professional and social networking mode, with 71% saying that professional networking is very important. Staying up to date with friends follows, with 62% considering it very important. Women also are very sensitive to how these social networks, which are struggling to find monetization models, manage to survive. The overwhelming majority of women (92%) are either very or somewhat comfortable with display advertising in and around their profiles. Of course, this acceptance may have something to do with the general invisibility of banner ads on social nets. Click-through rates and CPMs on ads in these zones are notoriously low for all the same reasons mentioned earlier: Women aren’t here for content but for each other. Arguably, user data and behavior are the most valuable things a brand can extract from a social network, but only 22% of respondents were very or somewhat comfortable with their social networks selling data to advertisers. This is an important point. Increasingly, third-party data aggregators are partnering with social networks to gather anonymous user behaviors that can be used to target these audiences elsewhere online. Generally, users say they dislike behavioral tracking online even when they are assured their personal information is not involved. In order to survive, social networks may well have to leverage their user behavior with advertisers. It seems from this survey that social networks might have a fight on their hands with their users, 41% of whom say they are uncomfortable with the selling of user data and 36% of whom say it would cause them to stop using the site. And it doesn’t look as if women are willing to pay the publishers directly either. Only 4% of respondents say they are very comfortable with the idea of paying a subscription fee for access to their social network. Nevertheless, 24% of users are “somewhat” comfortable with a pay model. This is encouraging news for network operators because it suggests there is room for a tiered pricing system. Much like LinkedIn, which is free for limited access, other social networks may be able to pull some services behind a subscription wall to lure heavy users into a pay model. In fact, we would argue that the attitudes toward payment and the usage data for social networks open the door for paid content models. According to ShesConnected, 59% of the survey respondents go to their social networks multiple times a day. That’s not a visit—that’s a serious habit. People pay for that kind of thing. If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com COMMENTS
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