Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski, grad student and professor at Harvard Business School, examined a random sample of 300,000 Twitter users and discovered an interesting phenomenon. Though women outnumber men on the microblogging site, men have more followers and are twice as likely to follow a man than a woman.
Women make up 55 percent of Twitter users, according to the sample, and both sexes are likely to follow the same number of people. But it’s not exactly a classic boys-versus-girls or good-ole-boy scenario, however. Women are 25 percent more likely to follow a man than another woman.
Interestingly, though it’s been said women talk more than men and men use technology more than women, neither sex tweets more than the other, so aside from women outnumbering men on the site, it’s not a matter of message volume.
These results are rather baffling to the study’s authors. “These results are stunning given what previous research has found in the context of online social networks,” they write. “On a typical online social network, most of the activity is focused around women – men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, and women follow content produced by women they know.”
A few other interesting findings from the study:
- The median number of lifetime tweets per user is one.
- On average, over half tweet less than once every 74 days.
- The top 10% of Twitters produce 90% of the tweets.
