Working in social media marketing we need to understand the types of people that (commonly) use all of the major social media platforms.
Nasty as it may seem – we need to understand things like age, sex, pay grade, marital status, location, shopping trends, social class and even IQ of the main users on each platform.
Who cares?
A lot of people apparently. IQ and intelligence are important factors in finding which types of content will resonate. For example; An article about Quantum Physics might not resonate that well with a young man that’s more interested in who won the match on Saturday. And that’s fine! Each to their own.
But this has brought us to a piece of research that might be interesting and advantageous for people or businesses to know. And note, we did come to this research with some preconceptions. (Which may or may not be debunked.)
The preconception.
Our preconception is that Twitter users, as a whole, are more intelligent than Facebook users. This preconception comes from posting thousands of articles, images and videos across all platforms and seeing that highly intellectual content preforms better on Twitter than Facebook. It just does! Now, does that mean Twitter users are smarter?
Well, here’s the bullet points…
The findings.
- A 2019 study finds that Twitter users make more money overall.
- Analytics suggest that news, political and science related content is consumed better on Twitter.
- Researcher finds small positive statistical correlation with IQ among Facebook users. And no relationship for Twitter users.
- Study suggests Twitter users typically smarter and more creative than Facebook users.
- Highly “open” individuals were drawn more frequently to Twitter for “intellectual pursuits”
Conclusion
From our (very coarse) research, we can deem there’s no real hard science to suggest Twitter users are smarter. There is however a lot of science to suggest that typical Twitter user and very different from Facebook users. And they use the platforms for very different reasons.
Broadly speaking; Twitter users are indeed looking for intellectual pursuits, news and informative content. Facebook users are looking for entertainment, photos and family/community content.
For help in using your website, Twitter or Facebook to further your business, get in touch with the Beacon13 team.