Do you Retweet every Tweet that interests you? Do you @reply someone every time you have a reaction to something he or she Tweets?

Recent statistics from social media analytics firm Sysomos report that 71% of Tweets garner no reaction whatsoever. This means no Retweets and no @replies. Sysomos’ statistics are the findings after studying 1.2 billion over the course of two months. The report also reveals that of the 23% of Tweets that do produce an @reply, 85% of those only produce a single @reply.  Just 6% of Tweets get a Retweet.

Mashable jumped on the story, and one of the commenters summarized much of my reaction: No @reply or Retweet does not imply falling on deaf ears. Not all information warrents a share or a response.

I know that Sysomos is just crunching the numbers as they saw them, but I don’t think the research paints a picture of what is really going on on Twitter. A few things:

• What about direct messages?

Sometimes, I’ll get into a conversation about making specific plans to meet up with someone on Twitter. I stop @replying that person and I send a direct message.

Sometimes, I just don’t feel that whatever I have to say is educational, informative, generic, or funny enough to share with the 1,800 or so people who follow me. Those Tweets people were sending didn’t go unnoticed or unreplied to, they were just private interactions via direct message.

• @replies and Retweets aren’t the only means for impact

Did you know you can favorite Tweets? Not that many people do this, but I do know some people who use the “favoriting” option as a way to bookmark Tweets for later. They do this with Tweets of articles they want to read later, for example, and keep track of it using a tool like Favstar.fm. Paper.li allows you to read Tweets in a newspaper-like format. Ever see those Tweets like “the Janet Aronica daily is out”? That’s someone publishing the links they found from their friend’s Tweets that day. Now, they may not have directly Retweeted that individual’s specific Tweet that hour or replied to that person’s Tweet right then.

My point is that just because it’s not in the form of an @reply or a Retweet, that doesn’t mean someone didn’t find a Tweet useful, funny, informative, etc. Also, how many times a day do you see a Tweet and just think “wow” but you are too busy at the time to actually type out a reaction to it? Again, that Tweet didn’t fall on deaf ears, it just didn’t garner a public reaction out of you.

• There’s a lot of “pointless” babble out there

I wonder how much of the 1.2 billion Tweets were just garbage. There’s a lot of junk on Twitter. My company has an “OH” account that’s just Tweets of funny things we say at the office. We’re the only ones who follow it. It’s basically an inside joke to us. (I’m sorry, social media gods, it’s pointless crap but it’s funny to us. ) It’s not meant to be @replied or Retweeted, but the 50 or so Tweets we’ve sent from it could’ve been a part of that 1.2 billion Tweets. I recently saw someone Tweeting about how she had started an anonymous Twitter “diet” account so she could Tweet about everything she ate and how she felt about it to help herself keep on track.

It’s 2010 and we still have that itch we had in high school when all we wanted was to put up a really great away message on AIM. We want to rant, snark and cry. We want to be heard but we don’t want to be held accountable, and I actually think there are a lot of Twitter accounts out reflecting this, but they’re anonymous. It’s your Live Journal, served up 140 characters at a time. Is it pointless? Well, it’s not supposed to garner an @reply or a Retweet, they are just thoughts.

I suppose the argument can be made that in order for a Tweet to really have legs, in order for it to resonate it needs to be shared publicly. However, I think that if you’re a marketer and you’re looking at this stuff, don’t read it as “Twitter is a waste if almost 3/4 doesn’t produce a public reaction.” What I’m going to look at is, how do my company’s account’s followers want to interact with me and share my content other than @replies and Retweets? How are you going to apply this to your marketing?