No Duh: 40 Percent of Tweets Just “Babble”
Saw this on Drudge- Someone analyzed a bunch of twitter posts and as a shock to no one, they found that 41 Percent of Tweets are useless babble such as “I like potatoes.”
From Breitbart:
Forty percent of the messages on Twitter are “pointless babble” along the lines of “I am eating a sandwich now,” according to a study conducted by a US market research firm.
Pear Analytics, based in San Antonio, Texas, said that it randomly sampled 2,000 messages from the public stream of Twitter and separated them into six categories.The categories were: news, spam, self-promotion, pointless babble, conversational and pass-along value. Pear said “pointless babble” accounted for 811 “tweets” or 40.55 percent of the total number of messages sampled.
Conversational messages — defined by Pear as tweets that go back and forth between users or try to engage followers in conversation — accounted for 751 messages or 37.55 percent. Tweets with “pass-along value” — messages that are being “re-tweeted” or passed on by users to their followers — accounted for 174 messages or 8.70 percent. Self-promotion by companies was next with 117 tweets or 5.85 percent, followed by spam with 75 tweets or 3.75 percent.
I wonder if the same can be said for Facebook posts? Myspace comments?
I like fried potatoes.
Hey, don’t knock potatoes! 🙂 Here’s our song called “I like potatoes”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiRcKumMzZw
I don’t buy the 41% number of tweets being pointless babble. I think it’s more like 81%. That’s why I will never Twitter…only a silly narcissist would think that people want to know when he is watching TV, eating some pie, or taking a crap. And you are right about Facebook, I have blocked half my “friends” because they post the hourly minutiae of their stupid, boring lives as if the rest of us are interested. Here’s a clue….I’m not!
Ed, you crack me up. And I would add that I completely agree and plus, STAY OFF MY LAWN! 🙂
My boss is on Facebook and was heard complaining about how too many people post stupid updates and he was getting cranky about all of the notification emails. So what happened? Many of his friends launched a 4 day campaign to post as many annoying updates as possible to drive him crazy.
They needed a study for that? My purely informal and anecdotal study shows that the above percentage is consistent with how much pointless babble people produce in general.