indie_preneur

Are my tweets sexist?

3.23.2010

By indie_preneur

I ask this because of looking at my followers 68% of them are men (I used ad.ly to get this info). Its been proven that in the twittersphere (& social media in general), woman are just as active men, if not more so. So why don’t I have more women following me I wondered?

• Do I come off as sounding misogynistic?

• Have I tweeted blatantly sexist material?

• Or, more importantly, have I tweeted subtly sexist material?

• Do I tweet too many non-gender neutral bits of info?

• Do I not follow enough women?

Looking back over my last few hundred tweets or so, I rarely sware or say things I would deem inappropriate. I most often try to tweet in a third person voice for just this reason. However, when I do add personality to my tweets, I do so in the first-person which obviously adds be a male perspective. I rarely used any words I would describe as sexist, derogatory, or having a male-bias. Checking lists of ‘sexist’ terms, I rarely used anything that would come off as ‘sexist’, not that I could see anyways.

I then thought do I not share enough gender neutral information? Do I share info that only dudes like to read? Half (or so) of the content I share is written by women, or they actively comment / post on those sites. This would lead me to believe that women, in general, do find the content I’m sharing interesting, theoretically at least.

So, then, my next thought was that I don’t follow enough female twitterers. Unfortunately, this is something I’m going to have to test over a few weeks or months. How about doing a little sociological experiment?

Hypothesis: if I actively follow more woman, more woman will follow me back.

I never really thought about this before now, but I don’t actively follow people based on anything besides the content they produce. However, I wonder if I give off an aura of being more interested in what male twitterers have to say than female. This is, of course, completely untrue, but anyone who doesn’t have access to my brain might not know this.

I am going to change only one aspect of my twitter usage, and that’s just following more woman. I don’t feel I need to change up what I share, and how I share it. I have taken an active tactic of late to attempt to create much more engaging tweets–over the last few weeks my number of clicks on the links I had shared had drastically fallen down. However, I don’t think I need to change the tone or the wording I choose. I think that a certain amount of personality in tweets adds to what I find so great about twitter.

If I’m wrong

If don’t end up getting more followers, then I’ll just give up tweeting. No, that’d be silly.

However, I will have to really dig into what the problem is. Perhaps my personal brand might have a stigma associated with it. Or worse even, maybe women might just not give a shit about stuff I share. But, that’s neither here nor there now, let’s revisit in a month’s time or so.

And if I’m right

If my hypothesis does turn out correctly and I do get more female followers, then what? I don’t know what I expect to happen, but hopefully my content would get shared more to other woman (through women I begin following) as well. If that does happen, hopefully, a viscous cycle of following and sharing will ensue.

This is also just my random thinking, and could be completely untrue, but we shall see. Twitter, en garde.

BONUS–next time, I’ll try to dig into why not all my followers are engaged (as of now, only 56% are).

Post this goodness to twitter.

Tags: branding, content, twitter

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 at 8:36 pm and is filed under twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.