With Twitter being such a hot trend right now, research firms have been anxious to study how people are using the social platform, and analyze trends in aggregate view.
One such company, data analytics provider,
Pear Analytics, set out to study the contents of our tweets to determine if, in fact, we’re all just sharing mindless babble, or if there was something more intellectual going on.
Their findings aren’t all that favorable to those of us with lofty views of Twitter, because as it turns out,
40.55% of tweets are pointless babble.
The Pear Analytics group took 2,000 tweets in English from the public timeline over a time span of two weeks, with 200 tweets captured each half-hour from 11am – 5pm CST daily. They then categorized tweets into six different types: news, spam, self-promotion, pointless babble, conversation, and pass-along value.
The clear winner: pointless babble tweets, with over one-third of all studied tweets fitting into the “I’m eating a sandwich now” category. As somewhat of a redemption for our narcissistic oversharing ways, conversational tweets came in a very close second with 37.55%. Pass-along value — or RTs — captured third-place with only 8.7%, but, thankfully, spam only accounted for 3.75% of all tweets studied.
Other key findings:
- News tweets are heaviest at 2:00pm CST on Tuesdays
- Pass-along value tweets are most frequently seen at 11:30am CST on Mondays
- Spam tweets flow consistently all day, everyday
- Conversational tweets are heaviest on Tuesdays
Of all the studies we’ve seen on Twitter and online behavior in recent history, this one has to be one of the more scientific. You can read about Pear Analytics’ research methodology in the full report (
PDF download), but it appears as if they tried to capture sample data that would be reflective of the larger
Twitter population. Should that be the case, you and I should probably learn to keep more of the pointless babble we share on Twitter to ourselves.
