Twitter users aren’t talking to you or about you.

Attention brands: Twitter users aren’t talking to you or about you. In fact, they barely know you exist.

The most mentioned brands on Twitter tend to be there because they are part of constant daily conversation, not because of anything the brand is or isn’t doing on Twitter. That’s one of the conclusions of a six-month analysis of the service’s ubiquitous 140-character messages conducted by digital agency 360i and released today.

Despite marketers’ embrace of the medium, brands are finding themselves on the outside of the conversation. Of the 90% of Twitter messages sent by real people — the other 10% come from businesses — only 12% ever mention a brand, and most of those mentions are of Twitter itself.