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Industry Trends

40 Percent Of Twitter Just Pointless Babble

By August 17, 2009July 30th, 20232 Comments

Marketing analytics company, Pear Analytics, recently conducted a study about the type of Tweets being sent out on Twitter. They found that over 40% of tweets were just “pointless babble”

The study was conducted over a period of two weeks, between Monday and Friday and during the hours from 11:00 am to 5:00 pm. 200 English tweets were randomly collected on each of the 10 working days, resulting in a total of 2,000 Tweets.

The tweets received were then analysed and divided into 6 categories. These were – news, spam, self promotion, pointless babble, conversational and pass along value.

Spam and self promotional were expected to be the most common tweets. However, this was not the case. Of the 2,000 tweets the distribution among categories was as follows:

Category Number of tweets % tweets
News 72 3.60%
Spam 75 3.75%
Self promotion 117 5.85%
Pointless babble 811 40.55%
Conversational 751 37.55%
Pass along value 174 8.70%

Considering the fact that Twitter has recently changed their home page, changing their tagline from “What are you doing now?” to “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world”, it is quite surprising that news based tweets ranked last in the group. It probably means that the new direction that twitter plans to take has not yet really caught on.

Also, one expected the self promotional category to be more frequently used, but that is not so either.

While there are those who would be too happy to run down Twitter because the vast majority of tweets are pointless babble, Twitter loyalists would be quick to point out that the ability to post some useless statements and comments about oneself, were the whole purpose of Twitter when it was first started.