National Beat: Study Reveals That Twitter Primarily Functions To Perpetuate “Pointless Babble”
A study released by San Antonio-based market research firm Pear Analytics revealed what we’ve known all along: most people don’t use Twitter for news. They don’t even use it for self-promotion. They use it, officially, to tweet “babble” and “conversation”.
Pear Analytics’ methodology was elegant: They randomly sampled Twitter Monday through Friday, every 30 minutes from 11:00AM to 5:00PM for 10 days total over two weeks, resulting in a robust data set of 2,000 tweets. Pear then separated the tweets into six categories: News; Spam; Self-Promotion; Pointless Babble; Conversational; and Pass-Along Value. Tweets that didn’t fit into any or fit into more than one of the categories were labeled “conversational.”
The results: First place, Pointless Babble (40.55%); last place, News (3.60%). As the authors of the report write, “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 study cites a great data visualization by Gizmodo: If Only 100 People Were On Twitter. There would be “5 loud mouths”, or only 5% of the users who contribute 75% of the tweets. 20 accounts would be dead.
