Surprise! A full 40.5 percent of posts on Twitter–or tweets, as they’re called–can be classified as “pointless post,” according to a new study from Pear Analytics. Coming in second was “conversational,” which the company says makes up 37.55 of all tweets.
Pear Analytics published its investigation, which was conducted through a series of random samplings from the Twitter public time line, into the different species of tweets on Wednesday. That means that only public tweets were indexed; the numbers could be different if friends-only accounts were taken into consideration as well. (Obviously, that would be much tougher to analyze.)
There’s some interesting stuff in there. Despite some Twitter critics’ insistence that the microblogging service is loaded with self-promoters, Pear Analytics only classified 5.85 percent of tweets as “self promotion.”