Marketing metrics: How much are your tweets actually worth?

Who do consumers trust when it comes to purchasing decisions? That’s right you guessed it, social influencers!

Influence marketing is not exactly a new phenomenon, but has increased rapidly with the rise of social networks in the past ten years. Influencers themselves could be potential buyers or users of a product, or even third parties such as journalists or industry experts. The key to influencer marketing is that the influencer holds the power to shape and change the behaviour of others within their network. This is typically achieved by creating engaging promotional content to a wide and loyal audience of followers.

Source: http://hyperactivate.com/

In a world where customers are increasingly using online recommendations, influencers hold a lot of power in the social space. Recent research has shown that 74% of customers rely on social media to influence their purchasing decisions. This week, Twitter is celebrating its ten-year anniversary with over 320 million active users. So how much are your tweets actually worth?

A fantastic new tool from the company Webfluential allows users to gain an estimate of the potential monetary value of their tweets. Using a special algorithm to analyse your following, the Influence Estimator tool gives a rough approximation of how much you could charge per tweet. In order for this to work accurately you will of course need a following of at least 500 people in order to sufficiently monetise your 140 character tweets.

For those of us who sadly don’t have a large Twitter following, the Webfluential tool can be used to seek out influencers, searching by market type, age and location. Identifying influencers in new markets can be a tricky process, so tools that simplify this process can be incredibly useful for marketers. Interestingly it can also be used to calculate the potential tweet value of the world’s most followed Twitter accounts.


Source: http://webfluential.com/

The current queen of Twitter, Katy Perry, has a worldwide following just short of 85 million. To put that number into perspective, that’s more than two and a half times the population of Australia following her handle @katyperry. Should she wish to monetise her postings she could look to pocket up to $70,425 per tweet. Lenardo Di Caprio may have just won an Oscar, but with only 15 million followers by comparison he could potentially earn up to $45,035 for each Twitter post. These numbers may seem relatively small to the uber-rich celebrities with millions of followers, but social influencers with large followers can use metrics such as Wefbluential to gauge their own value and connect with potential clients.

However, changes to Instagram this week may potentially limit brand exposure through the use of influencers. New algorithms used by the popular photo and video sharing app means that posts will no longer appear in chronological time order. Mirroring the parent company Facebook timeline, posts will now be based on the likelihood that you will be interested in the content. This move will essentially see more power and control being given to Instagram in selecting which articles it should surface. Endorsements from social influencers that were once relatively inexpensive for large brands may soon come with a much bigger price tag as the company takes its slice of the promotional pie.


Robert Brunning
Current student in the Master of Marketing program at the University of Sydney Business School