Women like to socialize but men are all business on social networks

Okay, the title may be a slight exaggeration, but the data from a new study by the social contact search site Rapleaf is nonetheless interesting.

In what they claim is the largest social network study ever done, Rapleaf looked at the social connections of both men and women. All told, they collected data from over 30 million people on sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Flickr, Hi5 and others.

Interestingly, when you focus on users with fewer connections (well, relatively speaking — we’re talking about one group of people with between 1 and 100 connections, and another with between 100 and 1,000), women tend to have more friends than men. However, when you get to a really large number of connections (1,000 to 10,000, and also 10,000+), men have more friends. Since it’s highly unlikely that someone (here’s looking at you Robert Scoble) actually knows 10,000 or more people well enough to consider them friends, this data would seem to suggest that men are simply using these networks more for business rather than personal usage.

Here’s some of the key data (find the full data here):

Of the people with at least 1 friend, 53.57% are female and 46.43% are male.

Social Networkers (1-100 friends):

– Around 80% of the sample set

– Women have on average 62 friends

– Men have on average 57 friends

– Women are more likely to be Social Networkers

Connectors (100-1,000 friends)

– Around 19% of the sample set

– Women have on average 185 friends

– Men have on average 172 friends

– Women are more likely to be Connectors

Super Connectors (1,000-10,000 friends):

– 0.66% of the sample set

– Women have on average 1,837 friends

– Men have on average 1,944 friends

– Men are more like to be Super Connectors

Uber Connectors (10,000+ friends)

– 0.02% of the sample set

– Women have on average 24,077 friends

– Men have on average 24,584 friends

– Men are more likely to be Uber Connectors