New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets

[Commentary] Twitter has attracted tremendous attention from the media and celebrities, but there is much uncertainty about Twitter's purpose. Is Twitter a communications service for friends and groups, a means of expressing yourself freely, or simply a marketing tool? The authors examined the activity of a random sample of 300,000 Twitter users in May 2009 to find out how people are using the service. They then compared their findings to activity on other social networks and online content production venues. The findings may be surprising. Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women. The average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. 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. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. The top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets.