Twitter the home of man on man action
Male users on Twitter are twice as likely to follow other men as women. They are also more likely than women to be in reciprocal relationships where both men follow one another.
The statistics come from Harvard Business, which studied the accounts of 300,000 users. One note of caution is that the researchers classified users by comparing the real names listed on the account to a database of male and female names. That means there will be some errors, though it’s likely to be a tiny proportion of the sample affected, and the chances are that mistakes in both directions canceled one another out.
The most notable aspect of the findings looked at the way male and female users respond to the fact Twitter does not require users to have a mutual online relationship. In other words, user A can get updates from user B without B subscribing to A’s updates. (This is one argument for classing Twitter as a micro-blogging site rather than a social network.)
The most striking statistic is that for the average male user, 65 percent of the people they follow are male, despite the fact that women make up a slight majority of Twitter users, and that the two genders post updates at a similar rate. Women also follow more male users than they do female users. The research also found that female users are much more likely than men to follow people who don’t follow them back.
Author Bill Heil cites a previous study showing that on other social media sites, the pattern is usually the opposite: men more often follow the activities of women, often ones they don’t “know”, while women mainly follow other women, usually ones they do know.
There’s no statistical explanation for these patterns, but Heil does suggest what may be a cultural explanation: Twitter lacks the opportunity presented by Facebook, MySpace and personal blogs for men to read more lengthy personal thoughts and details of women and, perhaps even more importantly, to see their photos.
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