Twitter Trends: Why Do Men Follow Men?

This study, from researchers at Harvard Business School, is making the rounds. It’s based on a random sample of 300,000 Twitter users, analyzed for trends by usage and gender. Some key findings:

* “Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women. Men also have more reciprocated relationships, in which two users follow each other.”

* “[A]n average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. Similarly, an average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman.”

* “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.”

What to make of these weird gender discrepancies?

One theory: Twitter is very text-driven, whereas other social networks like Facebook and MySpace are more image-oriented. Maybe women post better photos and other rich media on their social network pages, and men provide more authoritative-sounding sound bites.

But maybe we just think men provide more authoritative-sounding sound bites because they come from men. It’s hard for me to imagine that there’d be that much variation between men and women given the inanity of most tweets. (As far as I know, no one has engaged in this type of content analysis of Twitter posts — but let me know if I’ve missed something.)

It would be interesting to see how things turned out if everyone used gender-neutral user names (i.e., the Twitter version of Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse’s famous blind orchestra auditions study).

Anyway, some other key findings of the report:

* Of the users included in the researchers’ sample, 80 percent “are followed by or follow at least one user. By comparison, only 60 to 65% of other online social networks’ members had at least one friend (when these networks were at a similar level of development).