Power of “mega tweeters”

There are only a few users with more than a million followers on Twitter. A few of them might be flukes (Ashton Kutcher ?), but most are not. They are celebrities such as Britney Spears and Oprah Winfrey or popular media sites such as The Onion and New York Times. I call them “mega tweeters”.

If you can get more than a million followers somehow, would you be “powerful” or influential as well? It’s the infamous chicken-and-egg problem: Unless you are already influential, it’s hard for you to get a million followers – and if you do not get a million followers, you can’t become a very influential tweeter. Well a million is just an example. But you get the point.

So what could you do with a million followers? I will give you just one simple example. The example is based on a real first-hand experience. I have modified the numbers a bit to maintain confidentiality, but these numbers are not very far off from the actual numbers.

Primary source (and in most cases, the only source) of revenue for blogs is advertising. Most advertisers pay by CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) – that is, if a particular ad is served 1000 times, they would pay the publisher a certain amount. Let’s say there are 20 display ads on any page, and let’s say average CPM from ads is $5. That would amount to $100 for 1000 impressions. Please note that I have highly simplified the value chain and numbers.

So when I write a really good article – I mean really good that kicks ass – on my site, I can get pretty decent number of views (I do not monetize my personal blog though). If I write the same article on a popular site, I get several times more views. Obviously the range of number of views you get on one site vs the other is huge, but the number is a function of three things in general: (i) quality of the article, (ii) popularity of site it is published on, and (iii) popularity of people (or tweeters) who read it.

Sometime back I wrote an article on a fairly decent site. The article was pretty well done too – at least people seemed to like it (or they highly disliked it – many times a controversial article can actually get more hits). I got like 300 “retweets” on it in just a few hours. After a few days, number of hits had peaked out as it typically does. But then all of a sudden everything changed. A mini celebrity (no, it wasn’t Britney Spears, though I wish it were), who has more than a million followers and is a legend in technology and venture capital community, apparently liked my article and retweeted it. The message went on to his more than a million followers. The number of retweets almost doubled in a matter of couple of hours. Number of hits on my article was already in 5 digits, but it almost got doubled as well.

So in the end let’s imagine this. If I had 20,000 views before the “mega retweet”, the article was earning $2,000. After the retweet, the revenue shot up to almost $4,000! Less than a 140 character message can put more than $2,000 in your pocket! (Do not get overexcited though: getting this many hits is not easy)

So my first question to you is this: If you get lucky enough to get more than a million followers, would you simply promote good writings and take a share of the revenue? Second, are you still skeptical of social media in general and Twitter in particular?