Well, that’s according to a study conducted on the use of the no.1 microblogging service.
Pear Analytics, a marketing intelligence firm, conducted a study by randomly sampling tweets Monday to Friday, every 30 minutes 11:00 am to 5:00 pm for two weeks. That’s 200 samples each day for a total sample data set of 2,000 tweets.
The result, which was released last Wednesday, was something that the firm didn’t expect.
Tweets from the site contained 40% of “pointless babble” – like what they’d eat for lunch or how horrible the traffic is – and 37% were “conversational” or parts of conversations.
Tweets with “pass along value” or re-tweets take the third place taking 9%, followed by self promotion, 6%, spam, 4% and news 4%.
“We thought the news category would have more weight than dead last, since this seems to be contrary to Twitter’s new position of being the premier source of news and events”, the report said.
So what’s the conclusion of this study?
There isn’t really, according to Pear Analytics.
“As Twitter continues to evolve, not only as a brand but from a user’s perspective, it is likely that the usage patterns will change,” the report said. “We did not predict that conversational (category) would be as high as it was, or that self-promotion was going to be as low as it was.”
Source: http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/social_network/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=219400104
