Facebook may be the 'coolest' social networking website, but males and females define cool differently, as researchers at the Queensland University of Technology have found.While women prefer applications through which they can express themselves, men choose ones where they can compete against others, according to the study. The researches have based their findings on an analysis of the value of applications, such as 'Scrabble', 'Mousehunt' and 'Superpoke'.
Lead researcher Rebekah Russell-Bennett said, ''Facebook users want to possess and share cool applications that enhance their standing within their network of friends. For women this is about self-expression, for men it is about who is the best.'' She added that both genders want novelty and rarity.
''The study found value is measured for women according to the ability of the application to facilitate self-expression of interests, values or personality, and for men according to the ability to facilitate competition and comparison,'' Russel-Bennet said.
Russell-Bennett, along with co-researcher Larry Neale, highlighted the importance of the study by saying that from a commercial view, organisations were struggling to understand how to develop a 'cool' application and identify the features that would encourage people to recommend the application to friends.
"Popular applications can attract tens of millions of views and uses per month, and given that applications are relatively cheap to develop and are distributed virtually cost-free, this makes them an attractive substitute to traditional advertising," Russel-Bennet said.
"Anecdotally we know that companies are spending a lot of money on applications but they aren't necessarily working." Now that they are armed with the knowledge of what motivates people to use and recommend applications, companies could better tap into the social networking market, Russell-Bennett added.
The results of the study titled, "What value do users derive from social networking applications?" will be presented at the UK Academy of Marketing conference in Leeds later this month.
