Are Those Bells Pealing for the Demise of Social Media?

BBC commented on a study about Twitter on how pointless a good portion of the tweets were. The study conducted by Pear Analytics revealed that 40 percent of the exchange is useless drivel. Pear Analytics conducted the study by following random tweets every 30 minutes over a two-week period. Sampled tweets were placed into six categories: “news”, “babble”, “conversational”, “useful information”, and “self-promotion”. About 38 percent were classified as conversational, and only 9 percent of all tweets were considered useful. Surprisingly, 4 percent of the sampled tweets were categorized as spam.

A total of 2000 tweets were sampled and the results suggest Twitter is mainly used by people to inform others what they are doing, like a status update.

If Twitter is compared with other forms of communications such as email, newspaper articles, forums, newscasts, SMS messages and blogs, 9 percent useful content is par for the course and 4 percent spam is actually a desirable figure. But a lot of people, obviously non-users of social media, say that content consisting of 40 percent pointless babble speak loudly about how meaningless the whole Twitter scene is. Those predicting the demise of Twitter and other types of social media don’t realize the big changes caused by Twitter and its ilk. Those in their early 20s prefer to be notified of events through FaceBook or Twitter much in the same way that 10 years ago, email became the preferred mode of communication. These people who belittle social media don’t realize how close they are to the bottom of the technology heap. These are the people who prefer their dial phones instead of modern pushbutton, touch tone sets because analog is good enough for them.

To realize the usefulness of social media, you have to get used to it. Companies nowadays are relying on Twitter for customer service. More and more people are finding interesting places on the net by following the tweets of notable web personalities.  There is value in messages being constrained to a length of 256 characters. You need to get to the point quickly and the message fits nicely into your mobile. The increasing penetration of mobile gadgets into web will only make Twitter more relevant.

To those who see the imminent death of social media, admit your mistakes and for once try something new. A sure-fire way to get a lively Twitter experience is to follow tech experts who actively post something useful. To reduce the amount of useless babble, cull those people who keep on sending useless stuff out of y list.