'Pointless Babble' Accounts for 40 per cent of Twitter Messages

A study carried out by a market research firm in the U.S. has concluded that over 40% of messages sent via Twitter can be classed as "pointless babble."

Over a period of two weeks Pear Analytics from San Antonio, Texas sampled 2000 tweets, all from the U.S., to enable them to produce their study. As the BBC reports the firm would dip into the stream of the popular social networking and microblogging site every 30 minutes between the hours of 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. on weekdays. When analyzing the sample tweets they had collected the firm separated them out in to six different categories. Those categories were news, spam, self-promotion, pointless babble, conversational and those classed as having pass-along value. Assuming that the study, which will be repeated on a quarterly basis, would highlight the large volume of spam and self promotion being transmitted via Twitter, Pear was to find that its assumption was wrong. For whilst spam and self promotion, mainly originating from businesses trying to generate sales, did between them account for nearly 10% of all the tweets that were sampled that figure was dwarfed by the 40.5% of tweets that were classed as pointless babble. Conversational tweets were nearly as popular as those deemed pointless babble, accounting for 37.5% of the sample, whilst those with pass-along value accounted for 8.7%. Less than 4% of tweets fell in to the news category. Ryan Kelly is the CEO of Pear Analytics and Inquirer.net reports him as saying that the decision to undertake the study came about after discussions amongst the firm's employees as to how Twitter is predominantly used. The study complete, Mr Kelly observed:

With the new face of Twitter, it will be interesting to see if they take a heavier role in news, or continue to be a source for people to share their current activities that have little to do with everyone else

He added that restricting the type of tweets people receive is possible when using filtering tools.