Most Tweets Fall Into Pointless Babble Category

Posted on August 13, 2009

The SFGate's tech blog called The Tech Chronicles has summarized the findings from a new study (PDF) from Pear Analytics. The study analyzed 2,000 tweets that were gathered randomly sampled from the public timeline on weekdays over a two-week period. The study found that over 40% of tweets fall in the "pointless babble" category.

40.55 percent were "pointless babble," which Pear defined as the "I am eating a sandwich now" tweets."
37.55 percent were "conversational," or "tweets that go back and forth between folks, almost in an instant message fashion, as well as tweets that try to engage followers in conversation, such as questions or polls."
8.7 percent had "pass along value," the tweets that are re-tweets passed along from member to member.
5.85 percent were "self promotion," messages about companies, products or services.
3.75 percent were spam, the "See how I got 3,000 followers in one day" tweets.
3.60 percent were news from mainstream national media outlets such as CNN or Fox.

Babble will likely be excruciatingly boring and irrelevant to someone searching Twitter for the latest news but it is far less trivial to a friend or family member that is following the babbler. You may not care that some random person liked the latest Harry Potter movie or is enjoying his burger but friends and family members that know him might be interested.

The Pear Analytics study (PDF) is worth a read because it also summarizes some other recent studies on Twitter.