In the United States, the odds an adult has a Twitter account are 1 in 20. That 5% is split along gender lines— 45% of Twitter users are men and 55% are women. And, as with many emerging technologies, the younger you are, the more likely it is you’re on the bandwagon. A person 18 – 34 is twice as likely to have a Twitter account (the odds are 1 in 12.5) than a person 45 – 54 (odds just 1 in 25).
While men and women both populate Twitter in large numbers, who follows whom is pretty strongly skewed along gender lines. On other social networks, like Facebook, most of the activity is focused around women—men follow women (women they know and women they don’t), and women also follow women (typically, women they know). On Twitter, however, a man is almost twice as likely to follow another man as he is a woman, and a woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than to follow another woman. And men are 40% more likely to be followed by other men than by women. As irreverent online publication Valleywag so elegantly put it, “Self-absorbed loudmouth guys have overrun Twitter like no other place on the internet.”
So now that we know the odds of how likely you are to be on Twitter in the first place, what are the odds you’re actually doing anything there? Again, don’t believe the hype. In fact, according to the Harvard Business Review, the median number of tweets over a lifetime, per user, is… wait for it… one. So where are all the tweets coming from? Some 90% of tweets are generated by only 10% of users. On a typical online social network, such as Facebook, the top 10% of users create just 30% of the content—which makes Twitter more of a destination to hear from a few key users, rather than a participatory place like the online community at large.
And what are these chatterers saying, you may ask? Twitter’s 140-character limit, combined with the self-analytical nature of social networking, has made the lowly gerund king of the word world. When Twitter asks, “What are you doing?” the answer also usually ends with an “ing.” “Going,” “getting,” “watching,” and “eating” all appear on the list of the top 100 Twitter words. The top 500 include such exclamatory terms as “awesome,” “totally,” and the venerable “wow,” along with texting-age abbreviations like “u” (for “you”) and “RT” (for “retweet”). And if u r wondering who’s doing all this totally awesome “going” and “getting,” the second most popular word on Twitter (after the ubiquitous “the”) is “I.” In the flesh and blood world, “I” runs a distant 10th in popularity.
So, while those 5% of people are getting their Twitter on, the rest of the world probably isn’t missing out on too much. Since over half of those Twitter users tweet less than once every 74 days, odds are they’re busy “going,” “getting,” “watching,” and “eating”—without announcing it to the Twit-verse.
Sources
New Twitter research: men follow men and nobody tweets [Internet]. The Conversation (Harvard Business Review blog). [accessed February 5, 2010]. Available from: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2009/06/new_twitter_research_men_follo.html
Science confirms: Twitter dominated by self-obsessed dudes [Internet]. Valleywag. [accessed February 5, 2010]. Available from: http://gawker.com/5275897/science-confirms-twitter-dominated-by-self+obsessed-dudes
RT this: OUP dictionary team monitors Twitterer’s tweets [Internet]. OUP (Oxford University Press) blog. [accessed February 5, 2010]. Available from: http://blog.oup.com/2009/06/oxford-twitter/
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