Dog People vs. Cat People: We Analyzed 43k Twitter Accounts To Find Their Differences

It’s a tail as old as time.

Cat people and dog people have always been at war. In fact, the vicious feud is something we’ve covered before on the Brandwatch blog. But is it all nonsense?

After all, and as our adorable header image proves, dogs and cats are more than capable of getting over their differences. Well, dogs can. The cat looks slightly less relaxed about the whole thing.

Using Brandwatch Audiences, we decided to compare those who described themselves as cat lovers and dog lovers in their Twitter bios. These are people whose love for their dogs and cats are central to their outward identity. We studied 18,287 cat lovers and 25,003 dog lovers who displayed terms like “love cats”, “love my cat,” “love my puppy” etc. under their profile picture.

For context, looking at mentions of cat and dog related hashtags on the platform as well as the number of dog vs cat lovers as referenced in bios, we think that Twitter prefers dogs.

Anyway, onwards.

The key differences

If someone describes themselves as a dog person, you might start to make assumptions about other aspects of their personality. Their dedication to their friends and family, perhaps. Maybe their interest in sport and fitness.

When we compared the dog lovers with cat lovers in Audiences, we were amused to find many of these stereotypes coming through in the data.

For example, dog lovers appeared more interested in family and friends than cat lovers, who are well below average here. Cat lovers also preferred more individual pursuits like books, fine arts, and photo and video.

Both, of course, were interested in animals and pets.

The differences extended to professions too.

Creative-types tend to be cat people (in fact, they love cats more than any other profession), while executives prefer dogs.

We were interested to see that students mention their love of cats more than dogs, but also that their group is over-represented here. Perhaps this is actually down to young people being a little more disposed to talking about their pets online.

You might not expect the CEO of a company to include their love of dogs next to their other esteemed accolades.

Those in scientific or technical jobs like researchers or IT professionals tended to prefer cats, too.

Meanwhile, teachers, sports people, sales people and healthcare practitioners preferred dogs.