Men on Twitter Inexplicably More Interesting than Men on Facebook, MySpace

An MBA student and his professor recently completed a study of 300,542 randomly chosen Twitter users, because this is what business students do. What did they find?

1) 55% of Twitter users are female.

2) Men and women tweet at the same rate. Which is to say, almost not at all. The study authors calculated the median number of lifetime tweets per user as one. One! This, they say, means most Twitter users post updates less than once every 74 days. Lazy arses.

3) Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women.

4) The average male Twitterer is almost twice as likely to follow another man than a woman (and 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman). The average female Twitterer is also more eager to see what the guys are up to: she’s 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. 

Quote: These results are stunning given what previous research has found in the context of online social networks. 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. Generally, men receive comparatively little attention from other men or from women.

Aw. That’s sad. Maybe you deserve a little love, guys.

Inkling doesn’t have an official Twitter account yet, though it’s in the works. This news fills us with both trepidation—how can we compete with all these seemingly scintillating male Twits?—and hope: Just make more than one 140-character Zen statement about science in two months, and it’ll be like we’ve published a career’s worth of books. Sweet.

Edited to add that now we DO have a Twitter account! Exciting times, these. Follow us here.