Did you know that Twitter is full of inane, boring tweets that nobody wants to read? It’s true, according to science!
A joint study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon, the Georgia Institute of Technology and MIT found that most people are only interested in about a third of the tweets they read — the rest are either instantly ignored or disliked.
(MORE: 140 Best Twitter Feeds)
According to The Telegraph, people’s biggest pet peeves are too many hashtags, updates on day-to-day routines and negative tweets. The most hated tweet of all is the “conversation tweet,” in which two people have a private conversation (publicly) that everyone else could care less about.
Also not popular: Foursquare check-in tweets, because the only people who care where you just had breakfast are already following you on Foursquare.
The study was conducted with 1,500 Twitter users, who analyzed 43,738 tweets from 21,000 accounts. Some good news for Ashton Kutcher: Twitter users really like self-promotional messages from celebrities.
The lesson here — aside from the apparent upsides of being famous and self-centered — is to keep your tweets positive, don’t bother telling people about every little facet of your life and don’t clog up your tweets with too many hashtags and @mentions.
In related news, you can follow me @kwagstaff, where I have violated every single “Don’t” I just mentioned.