When my husband saw the book What Women Want by Paco Underhill, sitting on our coffee table, he cringed a bit thinking that I had purchased a “how-to-get-your-husband-to-…..” manual. Not even close, as this book examines what motivates women to buy, to shop, to surf the web, to read blogs, and more. Underhill’s firm is Envirosell which specializes in the study of human behavior in retail, service, home and online environments.

Paco Underhill’s first book Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping quickly became the must-read book for anyone who owned a brick-and-mortar store, an online gift boutique, a store in a cavernous shopping mall. It is a great book about his literal hands-on research and experiments about how people shop. Are there specific traffic patterns in a store? Why do any little products displayed at the checkout – called impulse items – sell very well no matter what? What Women Want shares more of Paco’s research results, and as I’ve been reading the chapters out of order, something I tend to do with these kinds of books, I came across some helpful Facebook statistics that I want to share here in the following quoted passages.

…Facebook has its definite advantages – particularly for women who today are at the forefront of all Web-based social media. Once they’re on Facebook, female behavior is driven by creating and fostering relationships as opposed to, say, transactions. Far more than men, women Facebookers tend to post their family photo albums, information about their children or posts about their day-to-day lives, and even their pets…

…Some 110 million people in the United States – that’s 36 percent of the population – are regular social networkers. Facebook itself has some 78 million regular users, defined here for our purposes as people who log in at least once a month. Facebook’s fastest-growing demographic? Women aged fifty-five and over – which is almost double the number of over-fifty-five men who use the site. Married women, especially, are signing up in droves. In almost every age group, Facebook is growing faster with women than it is with men. Right now, women make up 56.2 percent of Facebook’s demographic, an increase from 54.3 percent just last year. A recent article in BusinessWeek predicted that the future of all social media will revolve around women. I don’t doubt it.

Think about your own Facebook fans and how you interact with them. On your Facebook fan page, on the left-hand side, you have a box called “insights” which provides you with statistics on your visitor demographics and interactions. If women like to build relationships, then make sure you aren’t merely posting your latest product for sale on your fan page without ever engaging your fans. To read about Facebook fan engagement, please see Amber’s post Hearing Crickets? Quick Tips to Facebook Interaction.

I’ll be sharing more from What Women Want in future posts. In the meantime – what’s your own Facebook interaction like on your own fan page? How about on pages that you are a fan of?

~Laura Kuhlmann

Quoted passages taken from What Women Want by Paco Underhill, ©2010, by Simon and Schuster.