On Aug 12, Pear Analytics released a white paper discussing exactly what people are tweeting about. For two weeks they randomly sampled the public timeline in 30 minute increments between the hours of 11 am and 5 pm CST. They categorized the tweets into six categories:
- News: What is happening in the world news, not TechCruch/Mashable type of news
- Spam: We all know what this one is.
- Self-Promotion: Corporate posts, latest blog posts – you get the idea
- Pointless Babble: Apparently these are the “I am eating a sandwich” or “I am going to the mall” type of tweets
- Conversational: @reply posts or questions and polls
- Pass Along Value: Retweets
Because I usually get a lot out of my tweets (sharing knowledge, conversation), I was surprised to see that Pointless Babble came in with 40.55% of the captured tweets, but Conversational came in close at 37.55%, and Pass-Along Value was third at 8.7% of the tweets captured. Also surprising was that Self-Promotion came in at 5.85%, Spam at 3.75% and News at 3.6%.
Today I tweeted out a link to a NY Times article on online learning stats. Where do “Sharing” tweets come in, where people are exchanging knowledge? Is that News?
The results went a little further, noting that 11:30 am and Mondays have a large retweet value. Maybe people are sharing all sorts of things they are finding in the news as they return to their desk and sharing them on Twitter, inspiring retweets? Conversational tweets tend to happen between 2 and 4 pm. This is about when I get antsy and want to focus on something else. However, keep in mind that these tweets were all randomly sampled from the public timeline and Pear Analytics functions on CST. 11:30 am for them is different in for a lot of the rest of us.
In their white paper, Pear Analytics drew the conclusion that Conversational and Babble were so close that had they conducted a longer study, the two categories would constantly be trading out for first place. My money is on Conversational.
Oh, and guess where I found out about this study? Someone tweeted it.
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Cheers!
Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.
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