Tweets Largely 'Pointless Babble,' Study Discovers

Critics who say Twitter just consists of one pointless Tweet after another are only 40% right, a new study finds. Marketing firm Pear Analytics sampled 2,000 Tweets over a 10-day period for their analysis, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. Here's how the numbers break down:

• 40.55% of Tweets were "pointless babble," of the "I’m eating a sandwich now” type.

• 37.55% were "conversational" Tweets back and forth between users.
• 8.7% had "pass along value," and were re-Tweeted from member to member.
• 5.85% were classed as "self-promotion," including corporate tweets about products and services.
• 3.75% were spam.
• 3.60% were news items of the kind that could be found on national networks.

Pass-along Tweets were most common on Mondays, the study found, while conversational ones peaked on Tuesdays.

(More Twitter stories.)