Social media, trust and gender (for writers)

As so many writers use social media, I was interested to read this new study claiming to identify gender differences in the way we react to posts and messages.

Artios, a London-based artificial intelligence company (sounds good), presented 1,000 UK adults with plain text, anonymised posts from a selection of popular Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts and asked them to rate them on six criteria, including trustworthiness, approachability and friendliness.

The study found that:

-Women generally responded more positively than men to all types of content.

-Men were 5% more likely than women to respond positively to content written by a woman, and women were 2% more likely than men to respond positively to content written by a man.

-Women and men were also more likely to feel patronised when the post is written by the opposite sex.

Interestingly, Facebook content was most likely to get a positive response.

Facebook posts and comments: Women – 55% reacted positively; Men – 49% men reacted positively.

Instagram: Women – 47% reacted positively; Men – 41% reacted positively.

Twitter was got the lowest proportion of positive responses: Women – 34% reacted positively; Men – 29% reacted positively.

Andreas Voniatis, data science lead at Artios, said: “Our reactions to social media content can very easily be clouded by an author’s appearance, ethnicity, gender or how they self-identify.”

Posts written by brands were the best received generally. Women were 11% more likely to respond positively to brand content. Social media accounts in the banking and finance industries scored the best overall. 61% of women responded positively; 50% of men.

I don’t know if that helps us as we promote our books or communicate with our readers but for me the important thing is getting our biographies right.

As Andreas Voniatis goes on to say: “We often read a person’s biography before finalising our reaction to their post.”

Right. Let’s check out those profiles again… It never hurts to re-think and re-write!

study

*Here’s a link to the original research.

 

 

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