News Bits: Men Dominate Twitter

Written by Erin Barker

Tuesday, June 2. 2009 at 11:55 AM EDT 3 comments

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New research from the Harvard Business Review has exposed some surprising information about Twitter: It's just one big boy's club.

Although there are more women than men on Twitter, and both genders tend to Tweet at the same rate, men dominate most of the activity:

• Twittering men have 15 percent more followers than their female counterparts.
• An average man is almost twice as likely to follow another man than a woman.
• An average woman is 25 percent more likely to follow a man than a woman.
• An average man is 40 percent more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman.

According to the Harvard Business Review's blog post, these statistics place Twitter in sharp contrast to other social networks, where women tend to run the show:

"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."

Also included in the research was some bad news for Ev and Biz: The median number of lifetime Tweets per user is only one, and the most prolific 10 percent account for over 90 percent of Tweets.

In other news: