Twitter is mainly pointless babble and other rubbish
Analysts pinpoint self promotion, then self-promote
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Most of Twitter is pointless babble, spam and self promotion, a bunch of Texas-based marketing analysts with improbable nicknames has declared.
The study by Pear Analytics categorised a sample of US Twitter traffic into seven categories: news, spam, self-promotion, pointless babble (what it called the “I am eating a sandwich now” tweets), conversational and pass along.
The Texas-based research firm declared that pointless babble accounted for 40.55 per cent of traffic, while spam accounted for 3.75 per cent and self promotion 5.85 per cent. We'd take a guess that "conversational" will largely consist of people asking the pointless babblers what exactly was in their sandwich. Either way, it accounted for 37.55 per cent of Tweets.
This leaves us with total news accounting for 3.6 per cent of Twitter traffic and tweets with pass along value - or retweets - accounting for 8.7 per cent.
The researchers also found that conversational peaked between 2.00pm and 2.30pm, and again at 4pm to 4.30pm, with pointless babble peaking between 2.30pm and 3pm.
Apparently, the best days for news and conversation are Tuesdays. By Thursdays, though, Tweeters have descended into babble and spam.
Strangely the researchers did not consider what happened over the weekends, presumably because they think the Twitterati would be out rock climbing or mountain biking. This seems bizarre when so much of Twitter concerns sandwiches.
In the meantime, they suggest that anyone trying to get rid of the babble could consider a filter, such as Philtro.
Philtro's CEO is one Paul Singh, who has a BS from George Mason University, and who apparently "likes it when people call him "Mr. Metrics.""
Funnily enough, Pear Analytics' Business Intelligence Expert is "Paul Singh (aka “Mr. Metrics”)" who also has a BS from George Mason University.
Which if nothing else, suggests that Philtro should be able to spot self-promotion.
Should you want to find out more, Pear's website is here. ®
COMMENTS
@breakfast
Oh. My. God.
That, sir, is brilliant by any measuring system.
No Title
"I really don't understand those who spend so much time hating things that have no impact on them if they choose not to engage with such things. Bizarre!"
Much more fun than hating things that DO have an impact on you and which you DO engage with. Like your wife.
Only 3.75% spam?
Does that include or exclude the spambots that retweet random messages without attribution between their links to make automatic detection harder?
Definitely not included would be the spambots that follow given hashtags, and automatically follow anyone using them...
AC Thurs @ 19:40: "Twitter is for twits" - ITYM -i +a in that last word :) Just don't say it on radio :)
And what do they mean by "5.85% self promotion"? If they mean promoting websites etc. run by you, then surely some of that figure could be included in the spam count?
Does "news" include accounts that grab RSS feeds from news sites and tweet them?
I assume "conversational" is probably @ replies or mentions.
And talking of pointless babble and self-promotion... :D
As well as tweeting under my nickname, you'll find me behind a couple of twitterfeeds: @CovWeather and @LonWeather - both of which should be self-explanatory!
Now to spend an enjoyable evening blocking the 100s of spam accounts that will have read this and decided to start following me as a result...oh, and if you're deluded enough to genuinely want to follow me and read my random incomprehensible gibberish, might be a good idea to let me know so I don't include you in my next purge...
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