Anti-Twitter “study” is itself pointless babble

If you believe a new “study”, 40 percent of Twitter posts are “meaningless babble”. Even if you choose to accept that as true, it’s a statement that tells us completely nothing about Twitter.

As Dave Parrack reported earlier today, the study comes from a marketing research firm. Pear Analytics looked at 2,000 randomly selected posts from the site, then put them into six categories, with “pointless babble” the leader. That’s great for a quick headline, but misses the point in multiple ways:

Real life is full of pointless babble. If you analyzed the contents of conversations among people in a pub, at a bus stop or around the water cooler, you’d probably find that considerably more than 40 percent of it could be dismissed as pointless babble. The same is likely true of e-mails and text messages. But to say that’s a bad thing is to misunderstand the point of communication. Not everything people say has to be of vital importance or transmit new information: the simple act of conversation can build relationships and keep people in touch. What are birthday and Christmas cards if not pointless babble?

“Pointless babble” is a subjective term. The study found that 40.5 percent of Twitter posts were “pointless babble” while 37.5 percent were “conversational”. What on earth is the difference? Who are analysts to decide which elements of somebody else’s conversation have a point?

The survey method is deeply flawed. In most studies, a random selection is the best way to get a representative sample. With Twitter posts, that’s not the case. People don’t look at Twitter posts as a whole, they look at posts from people they’ve chosen to follow. The relationship between the reader and poster (whether a genuine two-way friendship or a one-way blog-style reading) gives posts a context and background which simply isn’t there when you read a random post from someone you’ve never encountered before, as the analysts did.

Percentages don’t tell the story. One of the main points Twitter detractors have picked up on in the study is that “news” only makes up 3.6 percent of posts on the site (beaten by spam at 3.7 percent), which supposedly means the idea that Twitter can be an alternative (or even a complement) to mainstream media is overhyped nonsense. That’s equivalent to arguing that TV network news shows carry no weight because most of the day’s programming is entertainment based, or that reports in a newspaper don’t count because they are outweighed by the page space given to features or advertising.

Twitter is a tool for communication. It’s exactly as useful or useless as the way you choose to use it. The method of this research makes about as much sense as listening to 10-second snippets of random calls and expecting it to tell us whether the telephone serves a useful purpose.

The company behind this “study” uses the slogan “analytics, insights and intelligence”. On this occasion all three are in short supply.

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