'Pointless Babble' tops Twitter usage

By siliconindia   |   Monday, 17 August 2009, 15:01 IST   |    10 Comments
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'Pointless Babble' tops Twitter usage
Bangalore: Twitter is used mostly for pointless babble, than as a conversational or 'pass-along value' medium. A study has revealed that around 40.55 percent of the total tweets can be classified as "pointless babble" or the "I am eating a sandwich now" tweets. Marketing Intelligence firm, Pear Analytics studied around 2000 tweets from the public timeline over a two week period from 11:00 am to 5:00 pm (CST) and captured tweets in half-hour increments. The tweets were then categorized as news, spam, self-promotion, pointless babble, conversational and pass-along value. Conversational came a close second at 37.55 percent and pass along value was third at 8.7 percent. Interestingly, despite some Twitter critics' insistence that the micro-blogging service is loaded with self promoters, only 5.85 percent of the tweets were classified as "self promotion" or those which are typical corporate tweets about products, services or "Twitter only" promos. This was followed by spam and news, both at four percent. The report said, "The results were interesting, and not in the order that we anticipated. As Twitter continues to evolve, not only as a brand but from a users' perspective, it is likely that the usage patterns will change. We did not predict that conversational would be as high as it was, or self promotion was going to be as low as it was."

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