Tweets Largely 'Pointless Babble,' Study Discovers

By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Aug 13, 2009 2:06 AM CDT
Tweets Largely 'Pointless Babble,' Study Discovers
College student Joy Troy checks a Twitter page at the Annenberg School of Communication department at the University of Southern California campus in Los Angeles.   (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

Critics who say Twitter just consists of one pointless Tweet after another are only 40% right, a new study finds. Marketing firm Pear Analytics sampled 2,000 Tweets over a 10-day period for their analysis, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. Here's how the numbers break down:

  • 40.55% of Tweets were "pointless babble," of the "I’m eating a sandwich now” type.

  • 37.55% were "conversational" Tweets back and forth between users.
  • 8.7% had "pass along value," and were re-Tweeted from member to member.
  • 5.85% were classed as "self-promotion," including corporate tweets about products and services.
  • 3.75% were spam.
  • 3.60% were news items of the kind that could be found on national networks.
Pass-along Tweets were most common on Mondays, the study found, while conversational ones peaked on Tuesdays.

(More Twitter stories.)

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