  The rise of social media has opened countless opportunities to explore social
science questions with new data and methods. However, research on socioeconomic
inequality remains constrained by limited individual-level socioeconomic status
(SES) measures in digital trace data. Following Bourdieu, we argue that the
commercial and entertainment accounts Twitter users follow reflect their
economic and cultural capital. Adapting a political science method for
inferring political ideology, we use correspondence analysis to estimate the
SES of 3,482,652 Twitter users who follow the accounts of 339 brands in the
United States. We validate our estimates with data from the Facebook Marketing
API, self-reported job titles on users' Twitter profiles, and a small survey
sample. The results show reasonable correlations with the standard proxies for
SES, alongside much weaker or non-significant correlations with other
demographic variables. The proposed method opens new opportunities for
innovative social research on inequality on Twitter and similar online
platforms.
