While Twitter might be the hottest social media application, for many Americans it’s just a bridge to a lot of white noise. That’s the finding of a study by Pear Analytics that looked at 2,000 English-language Tweets from a random period of time and broke the content into six categories, including “pointless babble” – which the study considered to be any Tweet that offered nothing of relevance (i.e. “I am eating a sandwich).
And what were the results? More than 40 percent of all posts tracked by Pearl Analytics were considered to be “pointless babble.” Including that number with the posts that were Spam and blatant self-promotion, then more than half of all Twitter posts essentially have no value to anyone. Which makes you wonder what the true value is of Twitter if people have to search through so much garbage in order to find posts with content that have even a grain of substance.
Meanwhile, social media analytics firm Sysomos broke down the most prolific Twitter uses, and to no surprise the list is populated with – as InformationWeek’s Michael Hickens says, “new media marketing types promoting themselves by sharing some of their expertise (a marketing version of paying it forward, I suppose), or tech mavens promoting their respective consulting and speaking businesses by demonstrating (showing off?) their acumen.”
So is Twitter an important communications tool, or just filled with drivel or people preaching to the choir? Only time will tell.