Twitter used to be great but it has turned into nothing but a website promotion site. The amount of traffic we get from twitter now is 1/2 of what we used to when it first started.

I retweeted this article.. where do you think will land?.. the 40% ?

So what if 40% are useless. Analyzing 2000 is completely useless in itself. Twitter follows the 80/20 rule where the majority of people you follow or care about reading about are celebrities or big name people in your industry. People drool over the fact that Britney Spears just made a sandwich, so useless is all relative.

I’ve had my account for a few months now and still am shy of 2000 tweets which 90% of them are business related. Everyone uses twitter for different reason, just like they use Facebook. Are you going to say next that Facebook is xx% useless? I don’t think so.

We have to remember that Twitter is meant to be aimless rambling about a moments activity. We have changed it to be more by tweeting away with business related offers in an attempt to drive traffic. So, really then, 60% of Twitter is useful! The glass is half full, and we benefit.

Even at that, most of my everyday business conversations are useless. People are constantly spewing the latest babble in an attempt to make themselves look good, or seem smart, or appear like they actually know what they are doing. Does this mean that 40% of their lives are useless. No. It gives us insight into who they are, and how we can help them, and what role they will play going forward.

So, test it out. Over the next two months, talk to 200 people in everyday business life, and see what percentage of their babble is useful. Then come back and give us a report. I think you’ll find Twitter has something on us.

I come at this from a different angle to most of the other contributors here.
As just a member of the public rather than someone with a business to promote can I just say that as far as I am concerned, where it comes to Twitter you can lump all the “Promotional” tweets in with the Spam

I use Twitter to keep contact with the daily goings on with my friends – much like the status updates on Facebook. This is the only function of Twitter I will ever have any use for. Anyone who sends me tweets promoting any company or website gets dropped from my followers.

One reason I wouldn’t buy anything from an unsolicited advert on Twitter / Facebook / Email is that there are just so many scams out there.

If I want to find a particular product or service, I use Google to search out a range of potential providers and then choose between them. I wouldn’t use Twitter as a search engine for this sort of thing as Google attempts to give me the most relevant results for my search term, not just the latest or the most talked about, like Twitter does.

To the general public adverts on Twitter are just more pointless babble.