14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter can be used in many ways and most weren't intended from the start. With the huge rise in audience the platform has seen in recent months much of the attention was placed on how the medium was transforming news reporting and spreading, becoming a favored source of real-time content. But a new study shows that, despite the hype, Twitter is in fact retaining its core use, the answer to the question “what are you doing?” as new data shows that 40 percent of all tweets are “pointless babble.”
The study, conducted by Pear Analytics, analyzed 2,000 tweets the firm gathered over two weeks. Each day between 11am – 5pm CST, a number of tweets were captured from the public stream every half hour. The tweets were then read and placed in one of six categories: news, spam, self-promotion, pointless babble, conversational and finally the ones with pass-along value – retweet worthy.
The results showed that 40.5 percent of all tweets fall in the “pointless babble” category, tweets like "I'm eating a sandwich," a number that is sure to discourage some of those hailing the microblogging site as a world changing service. Still, this isn't necessarily a bad thing as, after all, Twitter is at heart a social network and these are the kind of things most similar sites are used for. Furthermore, what may be pointless babble to a researcher or a random reader may actually be important or at least interesting to the friends of the user.
Further solidifying the “Twitter is a social network” notion is the fact that conversational tweets, where users would engage in IM-like conversations, make up a further 37.5 of the tweets. Finally, tweets with real value made up only 8.7 percent of the overall volume, a surprisingly low number for some perhaps but, still, probably a lot better than most social networks and even most blog posts. Thankfully though, the worst kind of tweets, self-promoting ones and spam, were low enough, with 5.85 percent and 3.75 respectively.