Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Twitter Usage, By The Numbers: Most Tweets are “Pointless Babble”
So a new survey has found that most of what goes on in the Twittersphere is “pointless babble.”
The study by Pear Analytics – of 2,000 random tweets over a 10-day period this month – broke all twitterings into six categories: news (anything you’d see on the news); spam (plain old junk); self-promotion (tweets pushing products, services or other “Twitter only” offers); pointless babble (”Man, I hate the Yankees“); conversational (instant message-type tweets, back and forth dialogues, questions prompting responses); and pass-along value (any tweet with an RT in it).
The results:
Pointless babble: 40.55 percent Conversational: 37.55 Pass-along value. 8.7 Self-promoting: 5.85 Spam: 3.75 News: 3.6
The study also presented some Twitter demographics, care of Quantcast.com:
55 percent of users are female 43 percent are between 18 and 34 78 percent are white 1 percent of users contribute 35 percent of the visits 72 percent are passersby; 27 percent are regulars
If you’re feeling beaten down by all the babble, first, be aware that, given the statistics above, you yourself are probably part of the problem. Second, there may be help in the form of a filter called Philtro, now in beta-testing: “If you’ve got a truly unruly Twitter feed, we’ve got your back.”
You thumb-up or thumb-down the tweets you like or don’t like, and the “type” you don’t like gets filtered out accordingly.
BTW: If anyone wants to follow my pointless babble, I’m @eniedowski.
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