How Much is a Tweet Worth? Valuing Digital Influencers

[ergophobe]

Let's say you're working the PR end of things and rather than buying ads, you would like to find influencers to Tweet out your story (or post it on Facebook or Instagram or whatever platform).

Paul Graham has written about how PR can trump advertising if done right: [paulgraham.com...]

But he's talking about getting stories about his business in the New York Times print edition. That's big stuff and we can perhaps put a value on it and guess at how much time and money it was worth to pitch that journalist. But what about when the journalist is just someone with a Twitter account with a following that overlaps your customer base? How do you decide who is worth courting and cajoling and how much effort and money it would be worth to get that person tweeting about you?

Back in 2010, Toyota gave $500 to new customers who tweeted [mashable.com] about their purchase. And it must have been worth it because I'm still talking about it five years later. Of course about the same time, Eventbrite found that a tweet was worth, on average, $0.43 [mashable.com].

The movie industry has found [madamenoire.com] that on average a tweet is worth $161 late in the cycle and over $700 during the release runup. A single tweet that expresses intent to go see a film five weeks before release can be worth over $4000 [variety.com].

That said, calculating value is complicated. Using the same data you can come up with numbers that differ by a factor of 10,000 [therichest.com].

So, the question is, how DO you value a tweet and in particular, how do you decide which Twitter users are worth sending free swag to in hopes they'll talk about your product or service?

How many followers do they need? What posting pattern? What engagement style/metrics? In short: what do you look at when deciding to spend some money on free stuff to get one or hopefully several 140 character reviews?

[brotherhood of LAN]

It's a very interesting topic, looking at a person's influence in a group. Would be interesting to see if anyone on here is working in this area.

[tangor]

Without being rude, but the reality is how much do you pay a shill with an audience to bark your goods (whatever they may be). The answer is: what the market will bear.

We've seen this all too often with celeb tweet endorsements of products/films over the years. Boils down to verified followers (number of, and demographics and the product offered). Most ad (shill based) campaigns have a 7-10% interested audience of the shill's total audience, which is about what it is in general marketing campaigns. Take that number, divide into what the advertiser is willing to pay, and you'll get your value per tweet.

1M followers
100K potential interest (buyers)
$1K spend (for one tweet)
Tweet Value: $1.00

As always, it is the conversion factor where the real value may lie... and that can only come from carrying through with the marketing.

The above is example/generalities and is not meant to reflect actual results for any shill based advertising, tweet or otherwise.

Hollowood (sic) Celebs are notoriously over-paid, so their numbers will skew more regular "big tweeters" who might be shills if the price is right.

[martinibuster]

Does the FTC guidance on revealing the paid status of a blog post apply to tweets? Or are paid tweets (even with swag) unlabeled?

[ergophobe]

how much do you pay a shill with an audience to bark your goods

Correct, that is the question. There is nothing rude in your characterization.

To put it in more detail... We don't have editorial control or control the number of tweets. We offer product to people we hope are influencers and we hope they will like it and will tweet, post, blog about it.

In theory, that could lead to a bad review. In practice, most of these people are professional shills. The ones who are what we used to call "journalists" back in the age of dinosaurs refuse the free product. Those reviewers are commonly barred by their employer from accepting anything for free from us.

For the others, though, they know that if they post a lot of bad reviews, they won't get any more free stuff which in most cases is the whole reason they started blogging/tweeting/facebooking in this niche. Which ultimately means their readers know the reviews are fluff pieces, which leads to low engagement which leads to low value to me which leads to me pushing my colleagues to have much stricter standards for who gets free stuff... and this question is part of my quest.

have a 7-10% interested audience

For the reason mentioned above, I'd question that for a lot of these people. We try to compare engagement metrics (comments, retweets, @messages), but that's hard both in the sense that it's work and in the sense that a lot of the retweets are also interested parties (other writers for the same site would be one such case).

For me, the simplest metric is to estimate how much we would have to pay for the same exposure and ask: do we spend this on free swag, promoted posts, or Google AdWords. The one difference being that if the person does become a genuine fan, there is the chance of repeat tweets, blog posts (and thus links), so the value is a bit different than an AdWords campaign where it stops entirely once it dries up.

We recently, for example, had an article published by a major metro TV station blogger who after getting pitched by us and getting her station to pay for free-to-her stuff started following us on social media and really liked one of our Facebook posts. She made our FB post and a similar one from someone else in the same niche the core of her short blog article and as a result, a post that took a colleague and I under 30 minutes to plan, film, edit and post got hundreds of likes and had a reach of something like 25,000 (our third highest of the last 6 months). So there are long-term follow-ons from some of these arrangements.

Does the FTC guidance on revealing the paid status of a blog post apply to tweets?

Since 2013, yes:
Announcement: [ftc.gov...]
Updated Guidelines: [ftc.gov...]

You can satisfy this requirement with the #ad hashtag and it MUST be included in the same tweet. It can't be in back to back tweets for example.

In terms of free swag where the person is not being paid to tweet but given free stuff in hopes s/he will tweet, it's less clear but I think this would do it: "Loving the Road Runner Buster that Acme products just gave me" would, I think, fulfill the FTC requirements. Something like #comp or #freesample would work too. In our case, many of these people just get a discount, so that's another issue. I'll also say that the vast majority of people who blog about products in our niche do not disclose.

Even worse, the requirements are fairly fuzzy. This is from the FTC FAQ on the subject:

A famous athlete has thousands of followers on Twitter and is well-known as a spokesperson for a particular product. Does he have to disclose that he’s being paid every time he tweets about the product?

It depends on whether his readers understand he’s being paid to endorse that product. If they know he’s a paid endorser, no disclosure is needed. But if a significant number of his readers don’t know that, a disclosure would be needed. Determining whether followers are aware of a relationship could be tricky in many cases, so a disclosure is recommended.
src: [ftc.gov...]

So in other words, Serena Williams does not have to disclose in her tweet about a new Nike shoe, but if Nike gives me shoes, my tweet has to say they were free.

[ergophobe]

Tangor - followup question: where do you get the 7-10% from? Is that an industry rule of thumb? Your experience?

Like I say, I expect it to be lower in the case of the people I'm looking at, but I'd be curious where that comes from anyway just as a benchmark.

[tangor]

@ergophobe,
Those numbers were an industry (print media, radio, tv) standard from the 1950s-60s and I've used them for estimation purposes since then. Experience shows that For Estimates, it has remained fairly valid as an Engagement criteria.

Recent experience (last five years) has dropped about 2% overall... the web is getting so much more complex and diverse that some adjustments are necessary. Perhaps the ability to automate so many of the old methods has something to do with that... easier to do, less value result. Not sure. I do know the old adage that 10% do the work and 90% consume has changed as far as webmastering is concerned. All to0 easy for non-creators/workers to spawn 100 or 1000 websites with the push of a button.... which really dilutes that paradigm! :)

[ergophobe]

Thanks. That's how I understood your original comment, but figured I'd ask to be sure.

[hannamyluv]

I have not calculated what a tweet is worth (or any other social interaction), but I do keep a calculation of what a Twitter, FB and Pinterest follower is worth. For my site, informational, this is what I value each follower at based on traffic the social sites generated, average income that traffic would generate and number of followers:

Facebook - $0.019
Twitter - $0.014
Pinterest - $0.312

It is not a really scientific method, just something fast and dirty. I keep track of it more for my hit by a bus file than anything else, because despite what people might say, social media followers have to be worth something.

[ken_b]

hannamyluv

Are those lifetime values, or ... ?

[ergophobe]

Similar questions to ken_b...

Is this based on conversions based on referrals from followers?

It sounds like you're doing it as follows
- X followers for Y visits from Facebook = visits/follower
- A visits globally (all sources) results in B dollars on average for a dollars/visit value
== dollars/visit * visits/follower = dollars/follower

[hannamyluv]

Are those lifetime values

No, per year. I recalculate about once per year and it is based on data for the year. To be really honest, I have not given it enough thought to calculate LTV. But is probably something that I should do eventually.

It sounds like you're doing it as follows

Yes, that is essentially it. I know it is not an accurate measure, especially with Pinterest (though with the changes Pinterest has been making to their pin suggestions, it is getting more in line). But it has been the best I have been able to come up with.

I have more than a few people tell me that social media has no value on paper. But it does. For resale, for marketing, for figuring out what kinds of resources can be applied to them, they have to have a value. People have no problem saying email lists or mailing lists have value (significant value actually) but then poo-poo social media. But these things drive traffic so I refuse to believe they are worthless. Right now, this is the best calculation I can come up with. But I posted it so that maybe a good discussion could happen about what a better way is.

[wheel]

I front a network of high quality websites in a high paying sector. I'm putting together a pricelist for paid tweets. We're probably going to lead with .25USD per follower, or $250 per 1000 followers.

So, that's how much I think I can charge retail. We have about 70K real followers across the network. We only deal with large advertisers though (actually, we normally only deal with large ad agencies working on behalf of large advertisers).

We're moving this direction rapidly because the ad agencies have advised us that their banner ad budget is being slashed by up to 80% in some cases, and that's the staple of our network. We're still getting strong revenue from banner advertisers, but only because our performance is so strong. On the banner ad side, our advertisers are seeking (and measuring) conversion costs per customer in the range of $400. We provide conversions on banner advertising at just over half that cost, so they continue to spend on banner ads.

Then nice thing about paid tweets and other social media stuff is that unlike banner advertising for revenue, we can resell multiple times. If we have 1000 impressions/month, we can only sell 1000 impressions. But we can sell 1,2,3,4 or more paid tweets per month. And facebook shares. And advertorials.

[EditorialGuy]

I think the value of a tweet, Facebook post, etc. depends a lot on what's being pitched.

If Frederika the food blogger says good things about a brand of extra-virgin olive oil, there's a reasonable chance that her foodie followers will remember the brand when they're shopping for olive oil at the supermarket. And if Monty the movie blogger says a new film is the best romantic comedy since When Harry Met Sally, his endorsement may sell tickets.

But when Terry the round-the-world travel blogger says Papua New Guinea is a great place to visit, how many of his followers on Twitter or Facebook are going to plan vacations to Papua New Guinea because of his endorsement? And when Otto the automobile blogger tweets that the new Rolls Royce Silver Tory is the best Rolls ever, how many Silver Tories will move off the showroom floor as a result? Most armchair travelers don't have the time or money to visit Papua New Guinea, and most car buffs don't have the means to buy a Rolls Royce.

[webcentric]

I think of the value of a tweet more in terms of traffic it generates to my website. From there I think in terms of ad revenue per visit/visitor for the most part. I'm not selling anything though so it's just one way to look at things.

[ergophobe]

EditorialGuy - that is more germane than you might imagine.

And as to the rest of you - this is roughly how I want to value tweets (that is in terms of market value for a similar amount of traffic). It has traditionally been a lot more seat of the pants here and I think we've given a lot of product for what has often been very little return.

My feeling is that a blogger/tweeter/instagrammer who doesn't send referrals to the website and doesn't have lots of comments on their posts has provided little or no value.

Where we trip up on that a bit is when people with a big social media presence tag our social media accounts but not our website.

[EditorialGuy]

A few years ago, Bitly published the results of a study about the "half-life of links" on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and "Direct" (e-mails, IM sends, etc.). The original Bitly blog post is no longer showing graphics, so here's a story about the study from Search Engine Watch::

[searchenginewatch.com...]

In the case of Twitter, links had an average half-life of 2.8 hours. That would suggest to me that the value of tweets depends heavily on how many people see them during their short lifetime.

One of the great advantages of evergreen Web coverage (compared to social-media posts or even traditional newspaper stories from the pre-Web days, which became fish wrap within 24 hours) is that it's the PR gift that goes on giving. Our own information site has articles and reviews that are still generating traffic for us and providing "decision support" for readers years after publication.

[tangor]

The value is in what is exchanged.

If you are SELLING something, then you can see the results directly in sales, thus can figure our what the spend accomplished, thus find the true value.

If you are looking for eyeballs... that's more difficult to quantify, and one would have to factor in that those eyeballs are looking for something specific the shill mentioned... not ads. There may actually be no change, or one so small as to be in the thousandth of a cent value.

[ergophobe]

>>can see the results directly in sales

Can you? I think it depends on how high in the funnel the tweet is. Also, if you have a high percentage of affiliate sales, tweets about your awesome product could result in sales via affiliates. I would expect that to be relatively frequent in the cases I'm thinking of.

I think a lot of people are part way between those two scenarios - they want more than eyeballs, but aren't expecting someone to tweet and tag their link with a trackable parameter. So at best if you got some really big exposure you might see a bump from Twitter.

Realistically most people who are going to tweet about your product will tag your Twitter account, so the user will go to your profile, then to your website, then to you checkout.

>>thousandth of a cent value.

Sounds about right.

BTW, from what I've seen right lately, if you have a modest social media presence and you push yourself hard enough, you can get boatloads of free stuff.

[tangor]

@ergophobe...

You're a glass half full kind of guy, I'm half-empty (unless I have a beer or two!). Actually, that sounds about right. There's never anything wrong with more eyeballs. Period. And, depending on y9ur product, one sale you didn't expect just might make the monthly budget (as some of my clients say... but they are BIG DOLLARS per sale... and usually few and far between).

We (the clients) do the shill side... but their products are not freebies by any stretch of the imagination. Might give a good discount, but not free stuff. And the product is sufficient that actual paid shills are as common as hen's teeth.

In all, shills work. They do. The value, as I said above, depends on the exchange (cost) as to whether it is successful or not.

Lookieloos, on the other hand, those that can't float the boat for the product, might look at ads (though my clients aren't in that category of website).

Finding that actual dollar value... that's a work in progress for all of us. This has been a fun, and illuminating, discussion.

[EditorialGuy]

One thing that needs pointing out: Public relations (as mentioned in the original post) isn't a form of direct-response advertising. It's about building and reinforcing brand awareness and credibility.

Do tweets and Facebook posts help in achieving that goal? Maybe, but measuring the effect of "influencers" isn't easy. As the department-store tycoon John Wanamaker once said about advertising, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble, is I don't know which half."

[fathom]

I haven't put much thought into this but I can certainly see there may be lots of potential. Thanks for starting this discussion ergophobe.

[ergophobe]

Public relations (as mentioned in the original post) isn't a form of direct-response advertising. It's about building and reinforcing brand awareness and credibility.
Do tweets and Facebook posts help in achieving that goal? Maybe, but measuring the effect of "influencers" isn't easy.

Yup. That's what I'm thinking about here and that's the essence of the problem

You're a glass half full kind of guy

Maybe. That said, I'm less representing my point of view as much as the point of view of decision makers on this. I'm more glass half empty personally and think that only people with a very strong presence and highly *engaged* following (forget number of followers, but looking at number of @replies for example) should get anything but a token nod of appreciation. Not lots of free stuff. One thing, however, is our inventory expires, so if it's not going to get sold at full price, it might as well go to a journalist or blogger who might provide some PR value. But there are costs associated even with that, just way below full retail.