Pear Analytics, based in San Antonio, Texas, said that it randomly sampled 2 000 messages from the public stream of Twitter and separated them into six categories.<\/p>\n
The categories were: news, spam, self-promotion, pointless babble, conversational and pass-along value.<\/p>\n
Pear said “pointless babble” accounted for 811 “tweets” or 40.55% of the total number of messages sampled.<\/p>\n
Conversational messages – defined by Pear as tweets that go back and forth between users or try to engage followers in conversation – accounted for 751 messages or 37.55%.<\/p>\n
Pear said tweets with “pass-along value” – messages that are being “re-tweeted” or passed on by users to their followers – accounted for 174 messages or 8.70%.<\/p>\n
Self-promotion by companies was next with 117 tweets or 5.85%, followed by spam with 75 tweets or 3.75%.<\/p>\n
It said tweets with news from mainstream media publications accounted for 72 tweets or 3.60%.<\/p>\n
Pear said it planned to conduct the study every quarter to identify trends on Twitter, which allows its users to send messages of 140 characters or less to a network of “followers”.<\/p>\n