Your Email Provider Reveals Who You Are

The research company RapLeaf recently published the 3rd article in their series where they’ve studied social media and email. Using a sample of 120,000 email users (AOL, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo users), they studied the gender, online activity, friend counts and social network memberships. It’s a really interesting study, and I strongly suggest you go ahead and read the full reports, not just this summary.

Part 1: Age and Gender

“Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo users tend to be younger while AOL users are slightly older. Hotmail’s audience tends to made up of more males, Gmail users tend to lean female, and AOL and Yahoo users are equally likely to be male and female.”

Part 2: Social Media Profiles and Friend Counts

“The vast majority of email users have two or fewer social media memberships and less than 50 friends online. Gmail users tend to be slightly better connected while Hotmail users generally have more social media memberships. Marketers interested in word-of-mouth advertising on social media should focus their efforts on the 7% of users with more than 150 friends to engage influencers.”

Part 3: Social Network memberships

“Facebook is the most popular social network with AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo user base, although MySpace rivals Facebook’s popularity with Hotmail and Yahoo users. In general, Twitter’s adoption still pales in comparison with Facebook and MySpace, although it will be interesting to see how Twitter’s growth affects its popularity in the near future. LinkedIn’s popularity is lowest among these email users, which might be attributed to an increased likelihood that LinkedIn users register for membership with their business emails instead.”

(via ReadWriteWeb)