Study: Only About a Third of Tweets Are Worth Reading

Mashable: In order to find out what kinds of posts Twitter users actually like to read, researchers from Carnegie Mellon, MIT and Georgia Tech set up a website called “Who Gives a Tweet?“. Over the course of 19 days, 1,443 people visited the site and rated 43,738 Twitter posts. The researchers found that followers liked only 36 percent of the tweets, disliked 25 percent and had a neutral reaction to the remaining 39 percent. In the words of researcher Michael Bernstein, “A well-received tweet is not all that common. A significant amount of content is considered not worth reading, for a variety of reasons.”

A high percentage of disliked tweets contained semi-private conversations, while other disliked tweets related to the tweeter’s mood or recent activities, including what the person posting just ate. On the other hand tweets containing self-promotion, sharing information or asking questions tended to be more popular.