André, Paul, Michael S. Bernstein, and Kurt Luther. "Who Gives A Tweet? Evaluating Microblog Content Value." Paper to be presented at 2012 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Bellevue, Washington, February 11-15, 2012.
From the abstract: "While microblog readers have a wide variety of reactions to the content they see, studies have tended to focus on extremes such as retweeting and unfollowing. To understand the broad continuum of reactions in-between, which are typically not shared publicly, we designed a website that collected the first large corpus of follower ratings on Twitter updates. Using our dataset of over 43,000 voluntary ratings, we find that nearly 36% of the rated tweets are worth reading, 25% are not, and 39% are middling. These results suggest that users tolerate a large amount of less-desired content in their feeds. We find that users value information sharing and random thoughts above me-oriented or presence updates." Read more
See Also
Garber, Megan. "Be Better at Twitter: The Definitive, Data-Driven Guide." The Atlantic, January 31, 2012.
