When you use Twitter, you may be revealing even more of yourself than you know. According to recent research (Quercia et al., 2011), Twitter users who are either popular or influential are more likely to be outgoing and unanxious. In addition, popular users tend to be creative, while influential users tend to be organized and detail-oriented. In the study, popularity was determined by the number of followers that a user has, and influence was measured by the number of social contacts and whether a user’s tweets are clicked on, responded to, or retweeted.
In this study, the Big Five personality traits – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism – measured personality, and in regard to the procedure, the investigators gathered personality data for 335 users and considered how it related to personality.
Overall, by knowing a little bit about how a person uses Twitter and how often the person’s tweets elicit a reaction from others, a relatively accurate prediction of the user’s personality can be made.
Quercia, D., Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D., & Crowcroft, J. (2011). Our Twitter Profiles, Our Selves: Predicting Personality with Twitter. In Privacy, Security, Risk and Trust (PASSAT), 2011 IEEE Third International Conference on and 2011 IEEE Third International Conference on Social Computing (SocialCom) (pp. 180–185). IEEE.
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