50 Million Tweets Are a Waste of Time Each Day
Following people on a social network does not necessarily mean that we generally enjoy and interact with their messages, tweets and status updates.
In fact, a considerable number of messages may be rather useless and drowns in the general noise. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Georgia Institute of Technology found that only 36 percent of tweets are "liked", while 39 percent did not affect readers and 25 percent were "disliked". That would mean that 50 million of 200 million tweets each day "are not worth reading".
"If we understood what is worth reading and why, we might design better tools for presenting and filtering content, as well as help people understand the expectations of other users," said Paul André, a post-doctoral fellow in Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute and lead author of the study. "A well received tweet is not all that common," said Michael Bernstein, a doctoral student at MIT. "A significant amount of content is considered not worth reading, for a variety of reasons."
Despite the social nature of Twitter, tweets that were part of someone else's conversation, or updates around current mood or activity were the most strongly disliked. On the other hand, tweets that included questions to followers, information sharing and self-promotion (such as links to content the writer had created) were more often liked."
The study was based on 1,443 participants who visited the "Who Gives a Tweet" site and received feedback in exchange for their willingness to anonymously rate tweets by Twitter users they were following. Overall, 43,738 tweets from 21,014 Twitter users were rated over a period of 19 days in late 2010 and early 2011. The researchers noted that the their particpants were not fully representative of the Twitter user base and included "informers, who value sharing links and content". The scientists consider their research as step toward understanding Twitter, but said that certain strategies to improve the value of a tweet were confirmed:
- Old news is not news
- Contributing to a story as well as teasers promote engagement
- Short tweets are better than long tweets
- Hash tags should not be overused
- People don't like personal details, negativism and checkins
- Tweets need context
- Public figures should tweet professional insight and lay off personal gossip
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Isn't it safe to say that all of them are?
I didn't need an article to tell me this.
All I can say is "Thank you Captain Obvious."
Doesn't surprise me, I have visited Twitter a few times and to me 99% of them are useless. The 1% is business who actually have something to tell the public.
Correction.
"That would mean that 50 million of 200 million tweets each day "are not worth reading"."
Should be:
"That would mean that 200 million of 200 million tweets each day "are not worth reading"."
i hated when people tweet about foods, like what they ate for lunch or dinner.
useless. you mean people tweeting what they are doing every second of the day is useless? i did not know that LOL
Tweeting and facebook, both of which are an entire waste of time....
I think it is amazing that it takes a scientific study to determine something inherently obvious.
The only "tweets" I will read is from a general manager of my favorite sports team. He doesn't comment much and only does to put rumors to rest or break trades.
Way too much information overload out there right now. People post about any odd detail they can.
DUH!
Captain Obvious strikes at the speed of stupid!
Too meany twats tweet on twitter.
Say that 5 times.
Other than a physics institute that I follow b/c I love to hear of new developments in science, Twitter is altogether useless for me, and I haven't even checked those tweets in a couple of months. How can something be so worthless yet worth so much money?
Are you SERIOUS? 140 characters is long?
Have they analysed small talk too?
Hello yo all. Agree. Bye.
I opened an account there once, never went there again.
It seems you are failing to get the real value of twitter. I don't follow my friends, that would be a waste of my time reading "I'm hungry" tweets. Instead I follow Rock Paper Shotgun, for example, who tweets their articles and news, and is better than an RSS, or just opening their site to see what's new.
Too many people follow friends and such just out of friendship, and end up with a cluttered screen. Knowing who is worth following makes Twitter a good tool.
Twitter/Facebook and the rest of the "look at me" generation are totally useless. The ony social activity I like to participate in and read are comments on artciles that are to the point and relevant to the article.
Reading about lame people who do little with their lives and then tweet about it and litter Facebook with their nonsense is very annoying. I've never used Twitter, but I know exactly what it's all about.
Twitter is one of the DUMBEST things to come out of the 21st century.
If I had a twitter account, I would have instantly tweeted this article!
I need to tweet this!
Proud to know I have never contributed to one of those tweets.
Although I agree that most tweets will probably not contribute much to the improvement of humankind, judging them according to likes and dislikes (and the lack thereof), is pointless... Peoples subjective opinions are not safe criteria for any statement's importance. If anything, filters that supress "disliked" tweets (or any other kind of post for that matter) will only serve to lead opinions to certain directions, wether the are commercially, politically or otherwise motivated.
Let's say a scientist tweets about an important new discovery concerning physics. Reactions to this could be as follows:
a)The average inhabitant of this planet would be more interested in Justin Beiber's underwear color so a large percentage of twitter users will simply not care.
b) The usual crowd of religious nuts will start protesting and as usual get a lot of mainstream media attention because they make for good TV (wich in turn makes money for said media).
c) A few people, fellow scientists and others who actually are interested in the world around them, will like it.
So, will that tweet be a "waste of time"?