July 29, 2009
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.
Maybe we should start gearing up to be better acquainted with some of the other social media sites that are on the up?
Twitter is growing *sigh*, so we might as well see if we can make the most of it. Are Webeden doing ok via Twitter?
ax
Comment by Alison Cross — July 30, 2009 @ 4:02 pm
Are WebEden doing OK on Twitter? Well its a difficult one to tell, and our post on how to measure it seems quite relevant
http://www.webeden.co.uk/blog/social-media/can-you-savour-the-tweet-smell-of-success/
We seem to be changing strategy: started off by following anyone who followed us. Now we’re being more picky. We’ll always follow WebEden customers and sites tho’.
We tried interupting people’s conversations, but as you’ve pointed out before I’m not sure how successful that was. Maybe a bit stalk-ie.
We’ve also started tracking the traffic specifically, since Google Analytics can’t seem to work out what is Twitter and what isn’t. And it doesn’t seem to be sending much traffic to us!
Ultimately, it would be good to foster a community of WebEden website builders - so we’re going to be adding the Twitter feed to the blog (in the next few days, honest!).
As for other social media sites: we use ping.fm to post updates across lots of microblogging platforms at the same time. Again, not sure how successful that is! At least they give you a good list of them though…
Ken
Comment by admin — July 31, 2009 @ 12:32 pm