Pear Analytics just published a whitepaper stating that 40% of tweets are “pointless babble”. This research has been captured by the mainstream media, as well as many blogs.
The main conclusion I took from this research is that I won’t be hiring Pear Analytics anytime soon. The research method is so poor that any conclusions are meaningless. Others have also pointed this out.
Pear Analytics grouped 2000 tweets into 6 pre-defined categories, one of which was “pointless babble”. They defined it as:
These are the “I am eating a sandwich now” tweets.
Without knowing any context behind people’s motivations for publishing content and their perception of their audience, we can never meaningfully group tweets by content. One might tweet about eating a sandwich, and for some followers of the publisher, it may in fact be a highly valuable tweet. Perhaps they previously bantered about eating sandwiches and some followers find this highly amusing, perhaps it’s an inside joke, or perhaps this content helps some followers understand the publisher’s availability for communication.
Also, tweets (and all forms of status updates), are not consumed as one-off independent items. People follow people, people don’t follow content. If we want to understand the types of content in tweets and how they affect their audience, we need to study the flow from tweet to tweet, the sequences of content over time.
Tags: Twitter
Sure, if you’re actually using Twitter to follow your friends, having them tell you they’re eating a sandwich may be fascinating. However, since most people feel compelled to cultivate huge followings and also follow large numbers of people, if someone you don’t know personally Tweets that just had a ham sandwich, do you really care? What about the guy who just posted about his number 2 following said sandwich? Sure, it may be hilarious to his frat brothers, but I don’t need to know how big or stinky it was.
The intent wasn’t to say Twitter was all Pointless Babble. We were just interested in what people were actually using Twitter for. Whether people were using it to post meaningless crap, to market their company or posting news. After the Iran elections, we thought more people would use Twitter to post news worthy type stuff. The Australian Govt recently used it to warn of a Tsunami. Most people are still using it as a way to tell the world every little thing they do throughout their day. Which is great if you care what all those people think about every minute of the day. Personally, I don’t. Which is why I only follow a select group of people.
We never wanted to say how people should be using Twitter. It was just a simple study to see how people are actually using Twitter.
Thanks for the response Sarah. More thoughts:
“However, since most people feel compelled to cultivate huge followings and also follow large numbers of people”
Do you know this to be true? What data are you referencing to make this statement? I’ve conducted much research in this space (most of which I can’t discuss here unfortunately) and through my observations and those of others, I believe that this is simply not the case. Many people on Twitter follow small numbers of people.
“What about the guy who just posted about his number 2 following said sandwich? Sure, it may be hilarious to his frat brothers, but I don’t need to know how big or stinky it was.”
How often have you observed this type if published content on Twitter? How much of your sampled tweets were similar in nature to this? Most people think carefully about what they publish in status updates and who their audience is. Also, people often have specific intended audiences for content. The problem is not that people publish “pointless babble” as you put it, the problem is that Twitter lacks a nuanced delivery platform allowing you to direct certain content at certain people.
My issue with your research is that your original groupings are ill-defined (non-standard terms), your hypothesis ill-informed (what research did you use to inform your hypothesis beyond internal office conversations?), and you have nowhere near enough context to group what you define as “pointless babble”.
I’m sorry that I don’t place much value on your research, this is simply my opinion.
I agree with pretty much everything you have said Paul but I see one thing lacking in the initial paper and your review and retort.
All users are not created equally. It seems the entire conversation is based on a user being defined as a single person tweeting for their own purpose that does X amount of tweets per week. Which is fine, but then we can’t bring up tweets from other accounts.
I would challenge the initial set of users to see which are actual users, which are companies, which are group or subject based. I would also try to determine if anyone were selling or getting referrals from any types of tweet they had as well to prevent skewing. The referenced tweet about the wildfires came from the ‘official’ LA Times Twitter account (if memory serves me) and really should not be in the same set as Joe just ate a sandwich.
Other factors to ponder.. if the users have professional contacts, people from work, and other prominent figures.. they tend to minimize their tweets in frequency and content as well. All of these filters give a difficult subject to study.
I have done massive amounts of research in this field as well and really I find it to be a slippery little devil. The more we try to define, the more it escapes definition. We have a lot to learn as things evolve.