Highlights from the new social media study by BlogHer, iVillage and Compass Partners:

• More than one-half (53%) of the US female Internet population of 79 million actively participated in some type of social media at least weekly.
• 55% of women participate in some form of blogging activity75% participate in social networks such as Facebook or MySpace
• 20% use Twitter
• 45% of survey respondents decided to purchase an item after reading about it on a  blog
• Of the female social media participants, 75% took part in social networking and 55% used blogs.
• But many women went beyond merely reading: 12 million posted to blogs and 8 million published them.
• In fact, women who used blogs were more than twice as likely to do so when they were seeking information, advice and recommendations than were women who participated in social

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A new study released in Harvard Business publishing examines gender trends in Twitter.

Highlights include:

• Females hold a slight majority on Twitter:  men comprise 45% of Twitter users, while women represent 55%.
• Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women. Men also have more reciprocated relationships, in which two users follow each other. This “follower split” suggests that women are driven less by followers than men, or havemore stringent thresholds for reciprocating relationships.
• An average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman.
• An average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman.
• An average man is 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman. These results cannot be explained by different tweeting activity – both men and women tweet at the same

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