As with life, 23% of Twitter conversation is useful
Does anyone else feel like the reporting on the latest Twitter reponse report is unduly sensationalist and negative?
Wired's headline screams It's not just you: 71% of Tweets are ignored, Duncan Geere's report on the findings of Sysomos' scanning of 1.2 billion Tweets. The headline might as well have been: Twitter is useless drivel: study to follow.
The other numbers are far more interesting, I think: 23% of Twitter messages receive a reply, and 6% are reTweeted.
Those are great numbers. They accurately reflect what Twitter is for.
Twitter is for conversation.
It's for chatting. And conversation isn't tit for tat. We do not say one sentence for every sentence that our friend says. If our friend says ten sentences and we say one, it's still a good conversation (provided it's interesting).
Reply ratios
When you sit down with a friend or meet someone at a cocktail party, do you reply to every single sentence she says? No, of course not. You listen first, then reply and comment on a fraction of what she says; that's how conversation flows naturally. It's perfectly reasonable that 23% of messages get a reply, because it's natural to only respond to the main elements of a conversation.
ReTweet ratios
Likewise, the reTweet is the digital equivalent of, "I was chatting with Barbara Evans last night, and she said the most interesting thing... " By no means would you reference every single piece of conversation you had with every single person last night. You choose one or two that stick in your head and mention them again when that information is relevant within the context of a current conversation. That is the reTweet, and it's perfectly natural that it only occurs for about 6% of the information out there.
So can we please call a stop to all the Twitter-is-useless-drivel arguments and headlines? Sure, maybe, but that's simply because 90% of conversation is useless drivel, too. It's the nuggets that hit home that are valuable, and not every word out of every person's mouth with be a nugget to everyone. Can't we just accept that the Pareto principle works here, too?