Why more Females are joining Facebook in India

Facebook, the top social network in the world with more than 600 million users is ruling in India as well. Six months ago, Facebook became the No. 1 social network in India surpassing Orkut. Considering its popularity, there is no way Facebook is going to be dethroned, at least not in the near future.

To find out what is driving users in India on this social network, I logged on to Social Bakers to explore the statistics in India. Below is what I have found:

With over 22 million Indians on Facebook, India is the 6th largest “Facebook nation” in the world. Facebook’s penetration rate in India is currently at 27 percent and about 1.5 million people join the network each month.

Here’s an interesting finding: Facebook is dominated by males in India. Over 70 percent of the users are male. This came to me as a surprise as we always believed that women rule social media. Apparently, in Asia, men seem to rule social media as we previously reported that there were significantly more male users than female in China too.

So, are the males destined to dominate Facebook in India? Maybe not. Digging deeper into the gender statistics, we found that the number of female Facebook users in India is growing rapidly (over 77 percent in the last three months). Our analysis is based on a comparison between a report we wrote in December and Social Bakers’s statistics.

That made us wonder what could have caused the sharp increase in Indian female users on Facebook. Numbers are dead and thus we decided to ask:

Co-Founder and online strategist at Foxy Moron,Harshil Karia, highlighted an interesting point. He reasoned that the rise of women centric brands on Facebook has attracted more female users on the social network.

“Facebook is being looked at as a ‘safe’ and more importantly a ‘must be at’ place for Indian female consumers,” said Karia. He also thinks that the increase penetration of mobile handsets is doing the trick. He said, “A mobile handset is a personal device, unlike a computer. This is important for Indian women because in certain conservative families, using the computer screen and being on ‘facebook’ may be looked down upon. The handset gives a woman the privacy to browse a social site without social stigma.”

Nitin Jain, CEO & Co-foundner of Digital upstarts, said that one of the ice cream brand that his company is working with has a 30:70 male to female fans ratio on Facebook. He added that this female trend has been observed in a lot of other brands too. In his opinion, brands which offered deals through Facebook are great incentives for females to join their pages.

All the above are reasonable explanations. One thing for sure, with this statistics, we can expect more female centric brands joining Facebook to connect with females in India. Last but not least, share with us if you know any other reasons which could explain the rise of female Facebook users in India.