Occupy Wall Street Twitter Mentions Reveal Gender Disparity

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The social network with the most chatter about “Occupy Wall Street”, at least the one that has seen the most mentions of “Occupy”-related terms, is Twitter, according to a study by New York social media marketing agency Attention, which examined data over a month-long period between September 10 and October 10.

Now, though, Attention has gotten more granular with it’s tracking tools, zeroing in on the specific hashtags and the stated genders of those tweeting about Occupy Wall Street. Again, as in prior Occupy Wall Street surveys, the results of Attention’s newest data survey are filled with some intriguing and perhaps unexpected results.

Analyzing tweets from September 10 to October 19, Attention charted the popularity of 12 “Occupy”-related hashtags and the stated gender of any user who had publicly mentioned any of those tags in their tweets. The hashtags charted included #OccupyWallStreet, #OWS, #OccupyWallSt, #Occupy, #TakeWallStreet, #OccupyTogether, #Anonymous, #Solidarity, #GeneralAssembly, #Zuccotti, #NYPD and #Bloomberg.

As the agency found, #OccupyWallStreet peaked at approximately 37,500 mentions during the first week of October, sharply falling to 25,000 mentions as of October 19. But the #OWS tag continued it’s climb from under 5,000 mentions for the first three weeks of September up to 40,000 mentions on October 19.

Overall, the number of tweets mentioning any of the hashtags hit an all time high of over 60,000 mentions on October 15, the same day that the protesters marched from their encampment in Zuccotti Square over 50 blocks up to Times Square as Occupy Rome protesters clashed with riot police and protests were called for in 951 cities in 82 countries.

But perhaps the most interesting finding from Attention’s analysis concerned number of female users on Twitter who were posting hashtags about the movement. For the week of September 10 through September 19, under 20 percent of the tweets containing mentions of “Occupy Wall Street” were female. By October 19, only 30 percent of the tweets were from female users.

Although the number of female users tweeting about Occupy Wall Street has grown, it was only by 10 percent in a month’s time. The disparity is even stranger considering that Twitter is the most heavily female dominated of the major social networks, with over 64 percent of Twitter’s users reporting themselves to be female, according a Pew survey in late 2010.

Attention’s results were published on Thursday, the same day as a separate study by social media monitoring firm Trendrr and Ad Age magazine. That study, which combined some 35-Occupy related terms, also found that October 15th was the peak day for mentions on Twitter, with 794,066 tweets. The Trendrr study also found a higher percentage of female users tweeting about the movement, some 38 percent, still a smaller proportion than one might expect given the fact that Twitter is female-dominated.

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