Two out of Every Three Tweets Are Useless

But not your precious little snowflake of a tweet about what you ate at Winterlicious. No, definitely not that.

A new study conclude that nearly two-thirds of all tweets – about 130 million of 200 million sent each day – are essentially useless. To determine this, the researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology asked 1,500 Twitter users to analyze more than 40,000 tweets sent from more than 20,000 different accounts. The users were asked to provide feedback on what they thought of the tweets, and they responded by saying that only 36 per cent of tweets they see in a day are actually worth reading. A full quarter of tweets were described as not worthy reading at all, and the rest were deemed "so-so." The users considered tweets that contained tedious details from peoples lives as well as tweets that were a part of a conversation between two users to be particularly useless. The same was true for tweets with too many hashtags (likely because those are usually Trending Topics bait more than anything else). Self-promoting tweets, such as ones linking to articles or informing followers of upcoming events, were found to be among the most useful. So, to sum: only talk about yourself if what you're doing is actually important. Otherwise, shut up.