A study conducted by American market research firm Pear Analytics have found that 40% of messages sent on twitter are ‘pointless babble’ like ‘I’m having a sandwich’. The finding comes as Pear Analytics looked into what people do with the service and found that only 8.7% of messages have value in that they are passing on useful information.
In order to gain an insight into how people are using Twitter Pear analytics analysed a Twitter stream every 30 mins between 11am and 5 pm on weekdays for a fortnight. In total the study grabbed 2000 messages and then categorised them into 6 categories; news, spam, self-promotion, pointless babble, conversational, and messages that pass value.
Apparently Pear Analytics prediction was that the majority of the Tweets would be deemed as useless information, spam and promotion given the rising usage of the service among businesses. However only 40% would fall into this category and the other major usage found was conversational – which are Tweets between two users.
On reflection these statistics would probably appear to what you might expect. New users to the service will probably find themselves guilty of tweeting pointless babble until they build up a good following. Also organisations that are still getting to grips with Twitter and those starting out are still finding ways to leverage Twitter as part of their marketing efforts. It’s still early days for Twitter and with so many guides on how to use the service being produced and case studies on how not to use Twitter continue you may expect to see these trends change over the next 6 months or so.
It will be interesting to see if these statistics change over time. Pear Analytics are to repeat their study every quarter to track trends so we shall see…