I heard some time ago that there is a difference in how men and women use language on twitter (selection of hashtags, tagging behavior) and it is even possible to identify the gender of the "speaker" by analyzing their tweets. I just did a quick search and found a couple of articles that might be of interest to you:

Burger, J. D., Henderson, J., Kim, G., & Zarrella, G. (2011, July). Discriminating gender on Twitter. In Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (pp. 1301-1309). Association for Computational Linguistics.

Cunha, E., Magno, G., Almeida, V., Gonçalves, M. A., & Benevenuto, F. (2012, June). A gender based study of tagging behavior in twitter. In Proceedings of the 23rd ACM conference on Hypertext and social media (pp. 323-324). ACM.

Chicago

This one is about facebook, but I thought it was interesting:

Li-Barber, K. T. (2012). Self-disclosure and student satisfaction with Facebook. Computers in Human Behavior, 28(2), 624-630.

I expect that there are differences.  I have a student who recently did an on-campus survey concerning Facebook use.  He found that males are more likely to accept friend requests based on checking mutual friends, whereas women tend to look at the prospective friend's "About" page.  Of course, this is a local survey, but it suggests that there may well be gender-based differences.

I also think gender identity performance is important in this issue. e.g., Bamman, D., Eisenstein, J., & Schnoebelen, T. (2014). Gender identity and lexical variation in social media. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 18(2), 135-160. http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1210/1210.4567.pdf

The previous posts seem to also suggest there are many variables of social media gender activity and/or performance: linguistic patterns, post topic, friend/follower choices, etc. 

Great question robin!!

@Yulia - Thank you so much - that's helpful.  An interesting take on this.  I too came across these articles but I haven't found too much.

@Michael - Interesting result regarding Facebook - I wonder why the difference exist.  Nothing comes to mind on that one.  I can see the need for more personal Twitter messages desired by women, possible to be assured the posting individual is approachable, less threatening, someone I could work with.

Not sure, but when I was a teacher at an all boys private school many moons ago, I had a conversation with someone who taught at an all girls school.  They said that the girls HAD to like the teacher to learn and to flourish.  While boys prefer a teacher they like, it is not required or considered a huge issue.  Not sure if that is related.  Have to think about it.

@Laura - Not sure what you mean by the influence of gender identity performance.  How might that influence social media differences? 

Pew Research Center has done an interesting study comparing the data between 2010 and 2015 and found that the recent gender differences on Twitter, Tumblr and LinkedIn are not significant (August 28, Monica Anderson).

According to the literature and previous research findings, I believe there is a forever constantly shifting landscape regarding the gender differences in social media use. The Pew research mentioned above concluded “Men catch up with women on overall social media use”. Their research also found there are still some gender differences in Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram with a larger female user base, for example, female internet users are roughly three times more likely than their male counterparts to use Pinterest (44% vs. 16%), while online discussion forums, such as Reddit, Digg or Slashdot attract a greater number of male users (August 28, Monica Anderson).

Please see the link http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/08/28/men-catch-up-with-women-on-overall-social-media-use/

@Jia - Yes I'm sure there are difference in what they use, but I am really interested in how they use it - there actually relations and interactions with other users.  Now one might say "So what" but if assumptions are being made, particularly with Twitter, the quality and nature of interactions might impact effectiveness and perceptions.

A good point, Robin. I do agree that there is a need to investigate the details about the characteristics of the twitter use. Most of current research literature including my previous study were examining the characteristics of the user population (e.g., age, gender) and their willingness (user vs. non-users and purpose of using twitter (e.g., information sharing for social, school-based studies or professional purposes).   

Robin:

I have found that generally, females tend to make longer posts than males, and they give very careful details and descriptions in online responses to forum discussions. The latter is even more evident when the forum is set up for an online debate and teams have to argue their points convincingly in order to win the debate. The attached link shows evidence of my findings, which I hope can be useful to this discussion.

Best regards,

Debra

Conference Paper Debating: A Dynamic Teaching Strategy for Motivating Student...

@Debra - Thanks for the article.  That's an interesting detail that might reflect other gender differences related to verbal ability.  Of course on Twitter, the # of characters limits this difference.  I wonder if females are frustrated by that limitation more than males.  Probably not, but something to look at.

The mix of personal/professional content on social media, Twitter being the most apparent since 140 characters+flowing emblemetic media are the norm, has caught my attention, too. To move things further than a hypothesis or limited cyber-ethnographic work, we, researchers, could delve into lists and analyze hashtags/interactive digi-literate practices of members/users/curators in those lists. That would ease the professional/personal delineation and possible compartmentalization due to not necessarily gender difference, but user rationality of lists, specific themes, issues etc. Would like to discuss further with those among you willing to search/analyze on a collaborative basis. Thanks for opening this up, Yulia. 

@Asli - I hadn't thought of that kind of study - but I am curious.  I am not clear how you would analyze intentions by looking at posts/hashtags/lists - In other words, how do we know what users were thinking?  Sounds challenging. 

Robin, maybe it's a matter of having them record their thinking while showing their activity via screencast or something? Or have some users in the lab explaining their activity in real time?

Yes Laura - I think that would be a great idea along with other methods of data collection, perhaps to see if the idea gathered are representative of a larger group.

Robin, I just meant we could ignore the varying usage practices and algorithmic impact on interaction if we look into more specific clusters such as lists. That buzz circumvented, the research question could be shaped as e.g. "How do women use lists in twitter to engage with, say, Climate Change vis-a-vis men?" Or "How does dissident discourse shape in Occupy lists, any gender discourse indication w/impact?" Hope it is more clear now for you.

http://www.genderit.org

@Askli  Thanks for the clarification. So you are adding a contextual variable that could make this far more complicated (which it probably is) than I had imagined.  That would involve a fair bit of data analysis.  Still very interesting/

I would say yes. Our recent research on Chinese Twitter " sina weibo" shows there is a gender difference in users' travel intention based on their user behaviour. 

Cheng, M., & Edwards, D. (2015). Social media in tourism: a visual analytic approach. Current Issues in Tourism, (ahead-of-print), 1-8.

@ Mingming - Since your paper is not yet available, can you give me an idea of what gender difference you found?  Thanks

@robin, see the link below. 

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13683500.2015.1036009

If you could not access it, I can send the paper to you if you let me know your email...

Hello Robin,

I see that your post was made many months ago, so you may no longer need resources, but the site Twitter Equality Quotient (http://twee-q.com/) supports a gendered analysis of tweets. Their data consistently finds that despite women making up over 60% of Twitter users (in 2014), male users are retweeted at a far higher rate: nearly 63% of retweets originate from male users.

I hope this helps!

Hi Bronwyn,

Thanks for this.  I tried entering 2 vaild Twitter accounts and it just came back that there were no "registered" retweets.  Not sure what "registered" means?  Definitely curious and a bit troubling behavior.  I wonder if females retweet females more?