What is this blog post worth to Twitter?
Do you ever feel that you can’t get away from people talking about Twitter? That every chat show, phone in, newspaper (and blog) article is packed with the latest from the micro-blogging site?
You’re probably right. All this free publicity is the sort of coverage most companies would give their eye teeth for.
This media space has a value. News monitoring service VMS has said that the free publicity generated for Twitter in just the last 30 days equates to a value of almost $50 million.
That adds up to around half of what Microsoft in planning to spend on Bing this year. And that’s just in the last 30 days!
The study said that of the offline coverage Twitter received, 57% of the value was on TV; 37%in newspapers; and 5% in magazines.
VMS Chief executive Peter Wengryn said to AdAge magazine, “”This is huge, We looked at online coverage of Twitter versus Google. Twitter is running significantly higher than Google and I didn’t think anything was more popular than Google.”
If we compare that through to Microsoft’s newest search engine, Bing managed to generate $573,834 (£364,000) of coverage.
But what does all this free coverage actually get Twitter? The short answer is: more users. The service reached 21 million unique users in June, up 14% on the previous month.
As we mentioned in our ‘5 things Twitter doesn’t want you to know‘ post, Twitter has big plans to grow its user base to 1 billion by the end of 2013. With all this free publicity, that job has been made a lot easier.
But every story has its day, and this coverage can’t last forever. Can Twitter boost its users before we tire of hearing about it? Leave us a comment below.