40% of Twitter Messages Pointless Babble

According to Pear Analytics, a San Antonio based market research firm, “pointless babble” accounted for 40% of the total number of messages sampled in a recent survey. If this comes as a shock to anyone, you haven’t dabbled in Twitter as of yet.

You can read the full article here on the Breitbart.Com website.

Given my evangelistic nature when it comes to social media, you’d think my reaction would be to defend Twitter. That's not what I'm going to do. People will use technology in whatever way they see fit, and I’m sure that there are people who just love to tweet about what they are doing at any given time (I’m sitting on the couch...I’m eating arugula salad). I would argue that if you look at your own e-mail inbox and/or just drift around the internet, many of the things you would run into are “pointless babble”.

The real lesson that can be learned here is how you can sort through the various social media tools and access those items that are of value to you and your members or clients.

Since this headline talks about Twitter, let’s talk about some Twitter Tools that can help you participate in the Twitterverse.

First thing you’re going to need is a free Twitter account. Set one up for yourself here on the Twitter website.

Next, you will need a free tool that will help you organize. There are hundreds of options, but I have tried these two and found each of the effective, so I can recommend them:

Hootsuite

Tweetdeck

Both of these tools will allow you to manage multiple Twitter accounts, search by topic, re-tweet messages, shorten URLS and send direct messages.

After that, you’re going to feel like you need an application on your smart phone so you can participate in the conversation if you are not near a computer . If you’re using a BlackBerry, you can get a free application called Twitter Berry. If you’re using an iPhone, a top rated free application is TwitterFon . Both are scaled down versions that will allow you to tweet from anywhere, follow your friends tweets, etc.

Finally, you can get an incredible amount of applications (capable of doing everything from Advertising and Analytics to Trends and Visual) here on the Twitter Fan Wiki Page.

These applications make using Twitter fun and interesting, and will allow you to make your own decision about potential uses of Twitter as a business and association tool. When you start tweeting, please feel free to follow me at http://www.twitter.com/plusdofo and I’ll follow you back – even if your posts are about sitting on the couch and eating arugula salad.