Twitter messages

By Ben Hurst on Aug 19, 09 03:25 PM

I loved the description of the types of different postings on the micro-blogging site twitter which was part of a new study.

The report from market research firm Pear Analytics described 40 per cent of the messages sent as being "pointless babble." (an unfeasibly low proportion, I'd say).

The study found that only 8.7 per cent of messages could be said to have "value" as they passed along news of interest.

In total it grabbed 2,000 messages and then put each message it grabbed into one of six categories; news, spam, self-promotion, pointless babble, conversational and those with pass-along value.

Conversational tweets were those that bounced back and forth between two users, and those dubbed "pointless babble" were of the "I'm eating a sandwich" type.

When Pear Analytics started its short-term study, it assumed that most of the tweets would be either spam or self-promotion. This belief, it said, was driven by the growing number of firms starting to use Twitter as a tool to drum up sales.

Instead, it found that 40.5 per cent could be classified as pointless babble, 37.5 per cent as conversational and 8.7 per cent as having pass-along value. Self promotion and spam stood at 5.85 per cent and 3.75 per cent respectively.

I think that the levels of self-promotion suggested - one in 20 being plugging a product or yourself - are unfeasibly low - a minimum of 90 per cent seem to be in this category! (Either driving traffic to another website [yes am guilty of this] or trying to ingratiate yourself with potential employers.