Twitter: 40 Percent of Tweets Are Just ‘Pointless Babble’
By Anna Johnson on August 24th, 2009An August 2009 study from Pear Analytics indicates that most of the content on Twitter is just plain pointless babble.
According to Pear Analytics, 40 percent of tweets is pointless babble e.g. ‘I am eating a sandwich now’ while 37.55 percent consists of conversations (i.e. because they begin with the ‘@’ symbol thereby indicating a conversation of some kind). Presumably much of this is pointless babble too.
Meanwhile, retweets – tweets with ‘pass-along’ value – comprise just 8.7 percent of Twitter tweets, self-promotional messages comprise just 5.85 percent, and spam and news comprise even smaller percentages.
So it’s settled then: Twitter is the harbinger of the inane.
Or is it?
Let’s face it, most of what human beings utter is just pointless babble too! (And yes, what is ‘pointless babble’ to Pear Analytics may be statements of the most profound kind among certain sectors of the community.)
So does it really matter that just a small percentage of Twitter content may be meaningful to some people?
What really matters to marketers is that, however they use Twitter, whatever they do on Twitter. and however much of what they or others say on Twitter is pointless babble… investing time and effort in Twitter delivers a satisfactory return on investment (ROI).
The contention that most tweets consist of pointless babble… is really just pointless babble.
Something interesting that Pear Analytics did pick up was that retweets tend to be at their highest on Mondays and Wednesdays, adding up to 10 percent of tweets on those days.
Hmmm… now that could be good reason to tweet your most non-pointless babble on Mondays and Wednesdays. (Or do people tend to retweet more pointless babble on those days?)
Source: eMarketer, “What People Are Tweeting About,” eMarketer, August 20, 2009
