Or is it? According to Michael Wolff, contributing editor at Vanity Fair Magazine, “An (anonymous) person from the high media stratosphere who asks to be identified only as “a friend” offers the following hypothesis: The Twitter demographic skews notably female.”
It is an interesting hypothesis and reminds me of a post I wrote earlier here on Girls in Tech (see post “As the World Wide Web Turns”). There have been many demographic studies about who uses social media sites more actively and it always has been predominantly women on sites like Facebook and mainly men on sites like Digg (recently redesigned fyi). Women have always been the more “social” sex and now that has translated onto the online world and women-centric brands are cashing in. In my opinion Twitter has essentially become the new “radio” where people follow companies and brands to participate in giveaways and attempt to be the “1,000th” follower to win instead of being the “1,000th caller.” And stay-at-home mothers and those working from home are the ones who participate the most in these contests so it is not surprise that they are quickly becoming tech-savvy to cash in on the twitter promotions.
Wolff states that Twitter has a “dear diary” quality to it that makes it unique and therefore attracts more women than men. He goes on to further state those men who do keep diaries use it not as a place to emotionally vent, but rather as a place to keep track of facts: names, dates, people, places. Sounds a lot like the “little black book” doesn’t it? And which man doesn’t keep one of those? There are even “Black Book” applications tailored towards men in the iPhone app store.
Enter geo-location applications. If men use twitter and other social networking sites to tell people about places like Wolff says, does this mean they are the main users of geo-location apps like Foursquare and Gowalla? And are they more likely to let Twitter post their location information? I turned to my Facebook and Twitter to check out if this was indeed true and from what I gathered, it is. Most of my male friends tweet things like “Good morning”, “I am at Starbucks (insert link via foursquare)” and it goes on and on. At the end of the day I can tell exactly where my guy friends were during the day. My girl friends on the other hand tend to tweet things like “p.s. eff my life because my horoscope on Yahoo! Is true.” Additionally, my Facebook news feed is filled with things like “John* has checked into ____” via foursquare or pictures to things they’ve seen throughout their day posted via iPhone (posters in a subway on a commute to work, etc.) Whereas girls will post news links, quotes, and “I heart Chuck Bass” in reference to the Gossip Girls episode from last night.
So is twitter the new diary? Are people micro-venting? Perhaps a dear twitter” column is in order…
Read the entire article here
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