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Is Twitter Pointless Babble or A Legitimate Communications Tool?
August 17th, 2009 • Behaviors, Social Networks, Studies & Research
Tags: Gizmodo, microblogging, Pear Analytics, twitter
With Twitter being the shiny new penny of the social media world, many are eager to find out how people are actually using the microblogging platform.
Pear Analytics, a data analytics company, studied the content of tweets to find out how people are really using Twitter. 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 winner? Pointless babble tweets, with over one-third of all studied tweets fitting into the “I’m clipping my toenails” category. Conversational tweets came in a very close second with 37.55 percent. Pass-along value — or RTs — captured third-place with only 8.7 percent, but, interesting enough, spam only accounted for 3.75 percent 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
Gizmodo recently published a blog post “If Only 100 People Were on Twitter”, with data visualization by Dave McCandless. What’s significant is that there are“5 loud mouths” per 100, or 5 percent of the folks who contribute 75 precent of the tweets. What does this mean? A handful of narcissistic people are contributing a significant amount of pointess babble to the Twitterverse.
As Twitter continues to develop, not only as a brand but as a communications platform, it’s likely that the usage trends will also evolve. Hopefully, the largest violaters of pointless babble will stick to Twitter’s inherent 140-character philosophy: Less is more.
With more than 15 years of digital communications experience, I've delivered award-winning and sophisticated marketing solutions for Fortune 500 corporations, major government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and household-name consumer brands. I ensure the successful execution of digital and social media business strategies to build profitability and grow market share on behalf of our clients. I stay abreast of relevant new technologies in the Web 2.0/social media space in order to contribute a point of view while remaining focused on ROI to drive the right message to the right people at the right time.
I’ve been working in or around the social media revolution since 2005 and I am grateful to be exploring this new media landscape with com.motion’s clients. As managing director, my role is to guide our clients through the use of new technologies and to provide innovative ways to engage their stakeholders online. Shiny new Web 2.0 toys are great to play with but our recommendations are always strategic and focused on reaching the right people, with the right message across the right channels.
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