What’s Driving Facebook Stock (Nasdaq: FB)? Women.

Women's interest in social media is one big reason why Facebook stock (Nasdaq: FB) hit record highs this year.

Earlier this week, FinanceOnline, using PEW Research Center, Nielsen, and Burst Media research, came to the conclusion that behind the majority of social media is a female-centric user base. The percentage of U.S. online adults using social media "several times" per day is 30% women versus 26% men.

And not just Facebook. Women are the driving force behind Twitter (NYSE: TWTR), Instagram, Pinterest, and Yahoo!'s (Nasdaq: YHOO) Tumblr too.

Pinterest has the biggest gender gap in its user base - 33% of all U.S. adult women who are online at a given time are Pinterest users, while only 8% of all U.S. adult men online at a given time are Pinterest users.

Here are the breakdowns for the other top social media companies, by U.S. online adults accessing the particular site: Facebook is 76% female versus 66% male; Tumblr is 54% female versus 46% male; Instagram is 20% female versus 15% male, and Twitter is nearly even at 18% female versus 17% male. The only major social media platform that's male-dominated is LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD), which is 24% male versus 19% female.

But the key profitability metric for social media companies like Facebook isn't that women are merely playing social butterfly - it's that they are interacting with brand advertising more as well.

More than half of women use social media to show support and access offers from brands, compared to less than half of men. Plus, 39% of women use social media to stay current with brands (versus 33% of men), and 28% use it to comment on their favorite brands (versus 25% of men).

All those female users combined with all that brand interaction add up to massive profits for Facebook - and a big boost for Facebook stock...

How Women Are Giving Facebook Stock a Boost

A few months back, we told readers how social media companies make money. The main revenue driver: advertising.

"Social media companies are legitimate advertising websites, no different than, say, Google or Yahoo. The same way Google made its money is the same way Twitter and Facebook will make their money," Money Morning E-commerce Director Bret Holmes explained.

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The fact that women are more interactive with brand advertising on social media sites can translate into huge profits, especially when a social media site has a large user base.

And Facebook has the largest user base of any social media company of all, at 1.23 billion users. Twitter has 243 million monthly active users.

Facebook's bottom line is clearly benefiting from its advertising.

Just look at these numbers...

On Jan. 29, FB released its Q4 2014 earnings, beating Wall Street's expectations and driving Facebook stock soaring over 9% in after-hours trading. By the next day, FB stock climbed over 14%.

The social networking giant posted earnings per share of $0.31, with revenue coming in at $2.59 billion, up 63% compared to the same quarter a year ago.

A surge in mobile advertising turned out to be key to Facebook's huge revenue number. Fourth-quarter earnings showed that mobile ads now account for more than half (53%) of revenue, up from 23% a year ago, and slightly ahead of Wall Street estimates.

And as it turns out, women are driving mobile ads profits as well.

Women use smartphones and tablets far more often than men do for social media, with 46% of women using smartphones versus 43% of men, and 32% of women using tablets versus 20% of men, according to FinanceOnline's data compilation.

Facebook stock is slightly down 1.15% to $70.74 per share as of 3 p.m. EST. Shares are up 3.15% over the last five days, and 29.46% so far in 2014.

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