The title of the story is New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets.
The findings for me are stunning; but then again, they’re not, because I see myself in their findings.
Men follow men, and women follow women. In my Psychology of Interpersonal Relations class, we learned that men define themselves by what they do (jobs and sports), and women define themselves by their relationships (families and crafts). As creatures, we speak different languages, even though we’re speaking the same one.
Being in the wine blogger world, I can’t help by wonder if perhaps that’s why female bloggers, for the most part – Sonadora excluded – have fewer comments than what the guys are writing? I wonder if it’s because women say and write what they do with more diplomacy, being more concerned about the reader or listener’s feelings, while guys like to stir it up a bit more?
Here’s a snippet from this study, and if you want more I’ll give you the link at the end of this.
For me, it was fascinating… and by the way, it was written by two people – a male and a female, so we should all enjoy this one’s balance.
New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets, by Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski
Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women. Men also have more reciprocated relationships, in which two users follow each other. This “follower split” suggests that women are driven less by followers than men, or have more stringent thresholds for reciprocating relationships. This is intriguing, especially given that females hold a slight majority on Twitter: we found that men comprise 45% of Twitter users, while women represent 55%. To get this figure, we cross-referenced users’ “real names” against a database of 40,000 strongly gendered names.
Even more interesting is who follows whom. We found that an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. Similarly, an average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. Finally, an average man is 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman. These results cannot be explained by different tweeting activity – both men and women tweet at the same rate.
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