Twitter poll shocker — or not — from a cleverly tech-news-making study by Pear Analytics: more tweets fall in the category of “Pointless Babble” (40.55%) than any other (News, Spam, Self-Promotion, Conversational and Pass-Along Value).

There’s plenty to dispute in the categorization, methodology, and meaning of the results, but one of the most interesting results was accidental, namely:

Our initial hypothesis that we intended to prove was that Twitter was being used predominantly for self-promotion. These are tweets that are trying to push a product, service or have a distinct “Twitter only offer” of some kind.

Surprisingly for Pear, only 5.85% of the tweets they tracked (2,000 public tweets over two weeks) fell into the “Self-Promotion” category.

A selfless lot, Twitter users. Or else it’s evidence that some of the ten-thousand odd self-proclaimed social media gurus ready to charge hundreds of dollars an hour to tell small business owners how to tweet their way to success may know a little less than they pretend to.

Pear plans to repeat the study each quarter to track trends. It’ll be interesting to watch.

Download the full results here (PDF).

 

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