Until recently, no one had studied how the gender of a user determined the subject of their tweets on the popular social network, Twitter.
A study conducted by the Language, Interaction and Computation Laboratory at the University of Trento in Italy looked at the daily patterns of life in Twitter messages (tweets), and was presented on Tweetolife.com via graphs highlighting the differences in the contents of tweets according to the gender of the users and time of the day.
The said study was conducted between November 2009 and February 2010. Over 1 million tweets were taken into consideration while carrying out the study. The tweets were then classified into two sections male and female, based on the first name of the user.
When the tweets were analysed to find out which words or phrases were used more frequently by males and which were used more frequently by females, the analysts found some interesting trends.
Both men and women talked equally about marriage, but women spoke a bit more about divorce. Dinner and movies were other topics that were discussed more by women than by men. Of these two subjects, men spoke about movies more than they did about dinner.
Surprisingly, it was the women who also spoke much more about love and sex than the men. The number of women who spoke about love was higher than the number of women who spoke about sex.
Not surprisingly, the topics that men spoke about more than women were found to be football and money, and if percentages are anything to go by, it seems men are more interested in football than in money!
Where it comes to technology, men were almost always found to be much more enthusiastic about it. Topics such as ipad, iphone, android and tablet pcs were all tweeted by far more men than women. Women, however, did seem more keen on the iPod than men.
Search engines are also talked about a lot more by men than by women. However, women do seem to tweet more about Yahoo! than they do about Google or Microsoft.
Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have seen almost equal adoption by both sexes, which is reflected in the almost equal numbers of tweets about each of these networks by both men and women. Not surprisingly, Digg is much more tweeted about by men, as it does seem to cater much more to men than women.
On the humourous side, tweets about Justin Bieber seem to peak round the time teenagers come out of school up till the time they go to bed.
When are most tweets about Justing Bieber posted?
While these figures might seem mildly interesting or amusing, they actually could help marketers decide how and where to target audiences based on interest and demographics.
