One evening last week, I conjured up a reasonably clever way to make a pretty good guess as to the gender of a Twitter user. At first, I thought, “This will only take a couple of hours to hack together”. Famous last words. As is often the case with these sorts of things, one thing led to another, and I found myself up at 4am to get the code done. But, I got it done.
Armed with this new data, I did a couple of things. First, I added a new feature to Twitter Grader to show a list of the Top 100 Most Influential Women on Twitter . The list was a little quirky at first, but has now settled in, and I think is pretty good. I know many of the women on the list, and they do indeed have powerful presences.
Next, I decided to look at how men and women differ on Twitter. Here are some of the quick snippets from the current data. Note: Though the sample size is relatively large at 200,000+ users — the data is currently skewed towards users in English-speaking countries. I hope to improve that over time, but until then, the points below are for amusement purposes only.
If you find any particular one interesting, there’s a convenient link next to each one that will let you tweet it out to your network. Good way to spark some debate and discussion.
Men vs. Women On Twitter
1) Men have an average of 643 followers on Twitter whereas women have 1717. [tweet]
2) Men follow an average of 287 users on Twitter - women 381. [tweet]
3) Men have Tweeted an average of 698 times - women 1542. [tweet]
4) Men have been on Twitter for an average of 502 days - women 496. [tweet]
5) There are over ten times as many men that have “verified” Twitter accounts as women. [tweet]
If you’re more of a visual person, below is a pretty little graphic that shows the same thing.
What I was most surprised by in looking at the data that despite there being many more men than women on Twitter, the average “Twitter tenure” is the same. What do you think? Any other questions you’d like answered from this data as I dig deeper?
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Matthew T Nelson 2:27 PM on August 09, 2010
I would love to know more about subject area in regard to gender on twitter. The usage stats are great, and was interested to see how much heaver the amount of tweets coming from Women are, but does it all group in to certain categories or is it just spread all over the place?
Laura K 2:49 PM on August 09, 2010
I'd like to hear more about how you have guessed the gender of the author. Do women use certain phrases? or idioms? How do you know you are right with your guesses? :) It is not surprising to me at all that women tweet more, follow more, and have more followers given that women tend to be more relationship oriented than men.
Billy MacDonald 3:59 PM on August 09, 2010
My thought on point #5 pertaining to the verified accounts is that Twitter seems to do this frequently for professional athletes, even if they are not overly well-known or have a large following. Does that seem like valid reasoning for that statistic?
Mary E. Ulrich 4:09 PM on August 09, 2010
The stats were interesting and I liked the way you presented the material in two formats--one for the verbal/linguistic learners and one for the visual/spacial learners (Howard Gardner Multiple intelligences).
I thought the fact that you could "tweet' the individual facts, not just the whole article was another new twist. Only issue with that was that once you tweeted and were directed to your Twitter home page, then you were off the Hubspot site. In order to finish reading the article or tweet a second fact, I had to go back into the original article (hope that made sense)
I'm not a techy person, but I do know that in TweetDeck and some of the sites I visit, when I click on the tweet button, it just automatically tweets it without me having to go to my home page.... (hope that makes sense too)
Bottom line, interesting facts and format.
I Dayal 4:39 PM on August 09, 2010
This is interesting. It will be great if this can be further segmented in identifying their demographics, and psychographics/ behavior patterns. Perhaps, more studies can suggest on when is the optimum time to reach out to your segmented prospects so that they are most receptive to your story!!
RM - InboundMarketingPR 6:07 PM on August 09, 2010
No surprise there... Woman are more social therefore, have more followers and can converse more than men....This is the way woman behave in the real world, why not in the online "social" world too?!!
Great data!
Ralph 6:57 PM on August 09, 2010
"1) Men have an average of 643 followers on Twitter whereas women have 1717.
2) Men follow an average of 287 users on Twitter - women 381"
Huge gap between those stats, must be a lot of lists/businesses doing the remainder of the following??
Joey 8:15 PM on August 09, 2010
I find it interesting how so many Twitter stats that appear hear and elsewhere rarely include other key stats, e.g., how many Twitter accounts are closed every day or how many Twitter accounts are opened with one tweet and never visited again! Twitter can be a useful tool but no where as effective as many people would lead you to believe. In fact, recent studies show that Twitter "ROI" is falling like a rock largely because so many people are discovering how large a "time bandit" it can be! Tweet now...
Lux 12:42 AM on August 10, 2010
It would be interesting to see "Who shares more?", perhaps by examining how much of their tweets are Retweets.
Larry 4:04 PM on August 10, 2010
I wonder what the effect of "Twitter spam" might be on some of your findings. For example, several times a week I get followed (or a request to follow on another protected account) by a spam that is styled as a female name, often with a number, and an enticing photograph. It's probably true that there is not much of an equivalent volume of "male" tweet spam. Nor would these fakes be "verified" I assume.
Could this have an effect on the stats? That is, many of the female twitters aren't necessary real females at all?
jean king 5:37 PM on August 10, 2010
I thought perhaps the women found on the list of the most influential would be the brightest, most clever, successful women. How disappointing to find Adrianne Curry at number 16. That completely negated the integrity of "the list" for me. She should head the list of twitiots.
ManPuppy Men 1:13 PM on August 12, 2010
This does not speak to gender-specific products.
Lori McNee 1:35 PM on August 12, 2010
I am not surprised at your findings. Women are very social on Twitter! But, it sounds like women still have to break though that 'glass ceiling' to gain more verified accounts - Twitter is a microcosm of the real world.
I am honored to be on your top 100 list - and yes, I am a real person, not a 'bot' and I do my own tweeting and love it!
Todd Randolph 2:55 PM on August 13, 2010
I would be interested in seeing the median as well as the mean on these figures to eliminate celebre-skew. Also, as noted above, the proof is in the RT count...
Zuly Gonzalez 10:43 PM on August 31, 2010
As others have mentioned, I'm not at all surprised by your findings. Women love to talk...and men love to ignore us :-) Seriously though, I'd be interested to know if the "chattyness" of a Twitter account influences someone's decision to follow that person.
Btw, if anyone is interested in following the 100 Most Influential Women on Twitter, I created a list you can follow: http://twitter.com/ZulyGonz/top-women-on-twitter