Men more active than women on social media, study shows
Social networking sites. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP
What you need to know:
- Male Kenyans spend more time on various social media platforms than women with about 66 per cent spending between two and three hours a day on social media.
Men in Kenya are more active on social media platforms compared to women, a new study has revealed.
The study titled: “Social Media Consumption in Kenya: Trends and Practices”, further indicates that male Kenyans spend more time on various social media platforms than women with about 66 per cent spending between two and three hours a day on social media.
The report conducted by the United States International University-Africa (USIU-Africa) SIMElab, was drawn from a nationwide survey of social media consumption patterns among different demographic segments between December 2018 and March 2019.
The survey sampled 3,269 respondents aged between 14 and 55 years from eight counties drawn from Kenya’s former administrative provinces — Nairobi, Coast, Central, Western, Nyanza, Eastern, Rift Valley and North Eastern.
To provide a comparative analysis, the county with the highest access to Internet in each regional province, as per the data released by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (2016), was selected.
The selected counties are Nairobi, Mombasa, Meru, Bungoma, Mandera, Trans Nzoia, Kisumu and Nyeri. The report revealed that 61.9 per cent of men use Yahoo! and 67 per cent of the men use Twitter.
Women least use Twitter as a social media platform. The study further revealed that men use Snapchat the least as a social media platform while women are most active on Snapchat. Snapchat offers on-demand geo-filters that allow users to custom-filter their photos, add effects and share videos with social media friends; that many women like doing.
On a demographic perspective, most women are interested in fashion and food blogs while the men are interested in sports and political blogs.
However, almost an equal number of male and female read online blogs on health and travel. On religion, the report revealed that Protestants are the highest users of social media followed by Roman Catholics and Muslims.
Hindus, on the other hand, were identified as the least user among the religious groups in Kenya.
The report, which was funded by the USIU-Africa and the United States Embassy, was carried out by the USIU SIMElab to map out the social media consumption in the country.
