How Much Is A Twitter Follower Worth?
Posted on by Ryan Deiss in Blogging, List Building, Marketing Tips, Social Media
Right now, a company is suing one of its former employees for…
… 17,000 Twitter followers — each valued at $2.50 per month.
According to the NYT, that’s a grand total of $340,000 folks!
It’s the first time I can remember a lawsuit that places an actual dollar figure on Twitter followers, but I’m positive it won’t be the last.
In a nutshell, the employee (Noah Kravitz) left the company (PhoneDog) on supposedly good terms. After leaving his post as a writer on PhoneDog.com’s blog, Kravitz switched his Twitter handle from “phonedog_noah” to simply “NoahKravitz.”
Can you see where this is going?
In the lawsuit, the PhoneDog is basically saying that the following Kravitz built while working for them amounts to intellectual property — a customer list of sorts. Therefore, even though the word “phonedog” has disappeared from his Twitter handle, the company alleges that they actually own the account.
Before you dismiss this as ridiculous, consider PhoneDog’s side of the argument. It would be one thing if Kravitz created a different account and tried to poach all of PhoneDog’s followers, but he literally took the account with him. The account and its followers were built by Kravitz as part of his employee duties…
Anyone interested in social media marketing, should be paying attention to this case…
BUT not simply for the legal outcome. Even though it probably won’t go to trail (few cases do these days), it will be interesting to see how PhoneDog tries to substantiate it’s dollar figures.
If there’s a settlement, it’ll require only a little long division to figure out how much PhoneDog received per Twitter follower.
Old school marketers are always asking: ‘What’s social media really worth? What’s the ROI?‘
Well, you’re about to get a pretty good idea.
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Kyle
24. Jan, 2012
Very interesting. I would like to see the formula their using to get the $2.50 value per person.
Dawn Abraham
16. Jan, 2012
I really like this article and I think you have something here for sure. I don’t think every person who follows you is worth $2.50 however although I do think that if you have targeted followers who listen to you each one is worth a lot more then $2.50 that I know. Love the concept.
OuterBox
30. Dec, 2011
Really interesting. $2.50 a person? I’d like to know more about how they came up with that number, but $340k is a decent amount of money!