How the genders communicate on Twitter may very well affect how often they are retweeted.
According to this study from NYU linguistics doctoral student Allison Shapp, men tend to get more retweets than women because they tend to use more traditional, or functional, tags (the who, what, when, where types) whereas women tend to use more “commentary” hashtags that express emotion, like “#soexcited.”
She says that how you use a tag determines how easy it is for others to find you. “A tag like #linguistics is meant to be searchable, to make conversation happen around a topic,” Shapp told the Atlantic.
Shapp collected a sample of 1,633 hashtags in her study of U.S.-only based tweets from an equal number of men and women, dividing them into “traditional” tags and “commentary” tags. She found that 59 percent of women’s tags were used to express emotion, while men’s tags, 77 percent, were used to express traditional information. (Check out her graph to the right).
The Atlantic added that other “studies have found that women do more diary-style blogging, while men’s blogs tend to feature more informational content; and that women are inclined to write with more personal pronouns, more emotive words, more abbreviations like lol, more emoticons, and more expressions such as ahhh, ugh, and grrr.”
Shapp also writes in her report that many “predictive models have been built” that are up to 88 percent accurate when determining the sex of a blog or tweet’s author, based on whether they use “informational” (men) or “involved” (women) language. Only the tip of the social media gender iceberg, she says more study is needed.
Regardless, this shows some interesting dynamics in communication styles, depending, of course, on which audience you’re trying to reach.
