At Least 40% of What You Say on Twitter Doesn’t Matter. OMGZ!

Pear Analytics is not the first group to throw down the “your life means nothing to anyone but yourself” gauntlet in regards to Twitter chatter. But they certainly did a great job of backing the claim up.

As reported on Mashable, a group of party-poopers at the marketing intelligence company meticulously combed through a deluge of tweets over a two week period, sorting each message into such memorable groups as “conversation,” “self-promotion,” and “news.” Naturally, there was a semi-respectable degree of actual content floating around in the Twitterverse. Believe it or not, there are some smart humans churning out real content and striking up meaningful conversations. However, the single largest category—by a long shot—was pretty depressing.

They called it “pointless babble,” and there was a lot of it. To the tune of 40.55%. Yikes.

Pointless babble takes on a variety of forms. Some examples from the current public timeline:

• Sushi night with Steffi. Perfect end to a perfect week!
• so happy right now.
• Lala land :-*
• with kat going to kendall’s to see katie laterrrrr
• 片手剣メモ２：罠は２回使え。なんと３０分位で

OK, I have no idea what that last one was, but you understand what I mean. And the scary thing is, those all popped up within seconds of each other.

So here’s a fun experiment. Take a look at your last 50 or 100 tweets. Categorize them based on the Pear Analytics categories, and post a comment below letting the world know how you ranked.

Here are the categories (and how I fared):

• news (8%)
• spam (0%)
• self-promotion (0%)
• pointless babble (16%)
• conversation (54%)
• pass-along value (22%)

How did you do?

(time to self-promote this on Twitter!)

photo by нasн