Men tweet from Mars and women tweet from Venus

June 2, 10:37 AMDC Technology ExaminerTanya Gupta

Previous Next

1 comment Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the DC Technology Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

 

According to a recently published study in Harvard Business Publishing, men and women have distinctly different behaviors on Twitter. 

Authors Bill Heil amd Mikolaj Jan Piskorski studied the behavior of 300,542 users in May 2009 and found some interesting resuts.  Firstly, 80% of Twitterers are followed by or follow at least one user. By comparison, only 60 to 65% of other online social networks' members had at least one friend.  The interpretation of the authors was that Twitter users are more savvy about the technology they are using.  One possibility that the authors did not consider is that this could also be because to get a friend on Facebook, for example, requires the person receiving the friend request to accept the request, whereas on Twitter you can follow anyone without their having to agree to be followed. 

Secondly men have 15% more followers than women.  In addition, men, more than women, tend to follow those who follow them.  This is inspite of the fact that there are more women on Twitter than men.  The reason for this is dificult to fathom.  Male domination?  Men are more interesting ?  What about reciprocity in men ?  Men will like almost anyone who likes them ?  The study certainly is interesting, but we now need a psychologist to tell us the reasons for these results!

Thirdly, a man is almost twice as likely to follow a man than a woman.   If you are a woman on Twitter you are 25% more likely to follow a man than a women.  Contrast this with the many more friend requests a typical women gets on facebook as compared to the typical man.  Again, this is a finding that is hard to explain.

Next, among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This authors say that this translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days. Finally there is a small group of users who are very active.  The authors found that the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. This is not that surprising until you compare it with other online social network, where the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production.  Bill and Mikolaj compared this to Wikipedia where 15% account for 90% of the edits.  They end by concluding that the Twitter model is probably closer to the publishing model than a two way communication model.