What do people really tweet about? Is it what they had for breakfast? Is it the latest breaking news? corporate marketing? Do people talk to each other or do they just throw random stuff out there? Pear Analytics sought to answer these questions once and for all.

First, let’s look at the demographics. A previous study by Quantcast showed that Twitter reaches 27 million people every month in America. Of these, 55% are female, 43% are between 18 and 34, 78% Caucasian, and with an aaverage household income of $30K-$60K. A dedicated one percent of all users are responsible for 35% of the visits, 72% are passersby, while only 27% are regular users.

Pear’s methodology involved random sampling of the public timeline. Every weekday for two consecutive weeks from 11:00am-5:00pm, they took a look at 200 tweets – or a total of 2,000 tweets in 10 days. These were grouped into six different categories: News, Spam, Self-promotion, Pointless Babble, Conversational and Pass-along Value.

The result was that what they rather derisively defined as Pointless Babble comprised the biggest share of tweets at around 40%. This includes random musings and shares things without necessarily looking to get anyone engaged in a conversation. Coming in at a close second with 37.55% is actual Conversations. These are made up of @replies and questions that seek others to share their own thoughts. Pear Analytics says that if the sample size were bigger and the polling was held longer, these two categories would probably even out.

Pass-along Value, or retweets, came third with a far lower 8.7%, while Self-promotion (corporate marketing and the like) was at 5.85%. Spam came in at 3.75% and lastly 3.6% was mainstream-type News. According to the research firm, “We thought the News category would have more weight than dead last, since this seems to be contrary to Twitter’s new position of being the premier source of news and events. Self-promotion was also less than expected, [which] may be enlightening to some folks, as there appears to be a flurry of companies and businesses joining Twitter to promote products and services.”

Another interesting result from the study was that the best time to go viral with your tweet is to send it on Mondays, preferably at 11:30am CST. Meanwhile, news peaked around 2:00pm on Tuesdays. Conversations, on the other hand, really get going in the afternoon, and more so during Tuesdays. Pear surmises it may be due to people trying to catch up with work in the morning and on Mondays before freeing time to tweet for fun. Sadly, spam tweets are constant every hour of the day.

Pear Analytics will regularly repeat the study every quarter to spot emerging trends. I do hope that in the next iterations, they’ll be able to include weekends, expand the hours, as well as increase their sample size considerably.