According to a study on Twitter conducted by Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski, you probably should.

While it may seem sexist in this day and age to consider using a male figure to achieve the results you desire in your marketing efforts with the social networking site Twitter, it might just be a good idea.  According to a Harvard study conducted by Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski, men have more followers than women. There is no explanation as to why this is so, but according to the study- men have about 15% more followers than women.  This figure is based on the more than 300,000 random Twitter users that they studied.

The study also reveals that men tend to follow men as the male users have more reciprocated relationships. According to the study “an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman”.  Even women are more likely to follow a man than a woman.  Men and women on the network tend to follow a similar number of users they are just both following more men.  According to the study there is a 56% incidence of a woman following a man but only 44% incidence of that same woman following another woman.  Of the accounts that men follow- 65% are mostly to be men and only 35% women.

The study is more quantitative than qualitative so there is no explanation for the results.  The study also does not analyze what percentage of the more than 300,000 accounts they studied are actually used for marketing purposes.  Could there be more male online marketers on the network resulting in more men following other men? There really is no explanation.

However the people who are creating Twitter accounts for marketing and business communications can use this study to develop their Twitter accounts.  You can create an account, managed by a male staff and to make it personal, put up the man’s photo on the profile.  You can also use the photograph of the business owner because you can’t risk losing the employee and losing the “personality” behind the Twitter account. Or you can even hire a male model who photographs well to be the “face” of the company. This is hardly a new marketing method, if it will work best for your marketing efforts, you should definitely take advantage of it.

Of course your efforts of creating a male personality for your Twitter will not be worth anything, if the contents you post on the network are all useless. The only way you can truly gain from social networks is when people begin to trust what you have to say.


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