A recent survey has found that Twitter is largely being used for "pointless babble", with sentences about eating dinner and the weather being top of the list of messages on the website.

The popular social networking tool was analysed by Pear Analytics, a firm based in Texas, which decided to split a random cross-section of 2,000 messages into six categories: pointless babble, news, spam, self-promotion, conversational and pass-along value.

It was discovered that no less than 40 per cent of messages meant absolutely nothing important, with conversational messages coming second with around 37.55 per cent of the sample.

Pass-along messages - those being forwarded to others after seeing it themselves - was third with eight per cent of the sample, with self-promotion from other companies only accounting for 117 tweets, or just under 6 per cent of the sample.

The news follows a survey carried out by website SendMeDiscounts.co.uk, which found there to be a 1,846 per cent jump in the amount of discounts proffered on the site between June and August.

According to a recent survey by Connect, the two biggest IT headaches for businesses were 'everyday hassles with IT' (37 per cent) and 'security concerns' (32 per cent).