Twitter study: Women tweet more but men complain more

Women tweet more but men are bigger complainers, according to a new study of Twitter use.

Women on Twitter talk more about personal matters, television programmes and work, the study found, while men are most likely to tweet about sport, gaming and news

When it comes to tweets related to brands, women are far more likely than men to be entering competitions, while men are much more likely than women to be complaining.

Women tweet around 15 times a day, on average, compared with nine updates per day from men, according to the study of 1,000 British Twitter accounts by Brandwatch.

"Many studies have shown that men and women use more similar language online than offline, so we were surprised to see such clear differences in the results," said Edward Crook, an analyst at Brandwatch. "140 characters encourages many of the non-standard features of spoken language, which could explain this divide.

"It is clear though that men and women are both discussing different topics on Twitter and using different language to do so."

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Twitter: how to get more followers

Scientists have produced an academic study that tells Twitter users what they need to do in order to gain more followers.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology studied data from over 500 Twitter users over a 15-month period.

After studying more than half a million tweets, the conclusion was that “expressing negative sentiments in tweets is the second most harmful factor to growing a Twitter audience.”

In other words, if you want more followers, try not to say mean things. This is certainly not an approach adopted by the comedian Frankie Boyle, who has almost 1.3 million followers.

During the study, the researchers recorded each user’s growth in followers and analysed a link between the size of the increase and the content of the tweets.

Scientists C.J. Hutto, Eric Gilbert and Sarita Yardi called the study the “first longitudinal study of audience growth on Twitter to combine such a diverse set of theory inspired variables,” according to The Poynter Institute.

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Twitter kills off TweetDeck apps

Twitter has announced that it is discontinuing three of its TweetDeck apps for iPhone, Android and Air.

Twitter announced in a blog post that the TweetDeck applications would be pulled from the clients' respective app stores in early May and would stop working shortly after that.

Many users choose to access the microblogging site using applications developed by third parties.

The demise of these apps marks an end to the heyday of third-party Twitter clients, a process begun last year when the company tightened its guidelines and "effectively wrestled developers into a choke-hold", according to Readwrite.com.

According to the Twitter blog, the company will be focusing it's efforts on its "modern, web-based versions of TweetDeck". This is unlikely, at least initially, to placate those users who are loyal to the older versions, particularly TweetDeck Air, which has a large following.

The British company TweetDeck was bought by Twitter in 2011 for $40m so the site could gain control of one of the most popular ways of viewing its own content.

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