Twitter or not?

To Twitter or not to Twitter? A report from media consultants Pearl Analytics has categorised a sample of 2,000 Tweets into six buckets (news, spam, self-promotion, pointless babble, conversational, and pass-along value) and found that about half was pointless babble, spam, or self promotion and about half was of some value to someone. Social media analytics firm Sysmos listed the most prolific Tweeters that actually have an audience-marketers of something or someone, including themselves.

Michael Hickins at Information week quotes the two surveys and says that

If you hold the conclusions of these vastly different surveys simultaneously in your mind, you get the idea that Tweeting is like electronic tent preaching to a congregation of like-minded preachers. If that sounds tiresome, it’s because it probably is. My own experience, though, is that it’s worth putting up with the predictable river of babble for the sake of an occasional gem.

Sometimes statistics and analysis run counter to everything we know in our bones about something, and sometimes they confirm what we suspected all along. In this case, at least for me, I was amused to see confirmed something I suspected about Twitter, which is that it’s the most valuable waste of time I’ve ever come across.I’ve succumbed to posting some Twitter myself, but have yet to find any that is useful to me, apart from (a very few) Tweets by personal friends.