A recent study by a US marketing firm suggests that as much as 40% of tweets on Twitter are ‘pointless babble’.<\/p>\n
Pear Analytics randomly sampled 2,000 tweets from Twitter’s public stream and divided them into six categories: news, spam, self-promotion, pointless babble, conversational and pass-along value.<\/p>\n
Pear found that 811 of the sampled tweets ( 40.55 percent ) fell into the “pointless babble” category.<\/p>\n
About 751 ( 37.55 percent ) of the sampled messages were categorized as Conversational messages. Conversational messages are defined by Pear as tweets that go back and forth between Twitter users.<\/p>\n
Pear found that only 8.70% of tweets had “pass-along value”. These were tweets that users “re-tweeted” or passed on to their followers.<\/p>\n
Corporate self-promotion accounted for 5.85% of tweets, followed by blatant Twitter spam at 3.75%.<\/p>\n
News from media outlets accounted for only 3.60 percent of all the tweets sampled.<\/p>\n
Pear plans to run the study every quarter to identify Twitter trends.<\/p>\n