Jon Burgess

The cost of Twitter? I was thinking, since I went another day with no hits to my sites from my Twits, how much is this whole twitter thing costing me?

Well… Twitter seems to be one of the slower sites I have ever been on, but it doesn’t take that long to post a twit… from login- to typing, to re-reading your post, before pushing the button… I’d say my average is 1 minute.

What does 1 minute cost me???? Well, I bill by the hour, $82-90 an hour… so my minute costs me (82/60=$1.36).  So every Twit I make is $1.36, or more…..

$1.36 is a soda, or a candy bar, or maybe a very small cup of coffee, not really that much.  BUT, in the internet that could be a TON.  For instance, I sell banner ads for 1 penny on my site.  Click throughs are not high, maybe 2%, so you would pay $0.50 per click.  I buy clicks in PPC platforms. I like to optimize the targeting of my clicks, so they tend to be higher per click than $1.36, but I know those are people that are very targeted, not Twitter look-e-loos.  On other sites I get clicks for $0.05, so that means I can get 27 clicks for that $1.36.

Twitter could be a whole lot more expensive than Free when you look at it that way.

I got a new follower,  this guy, http://twitter.com/Zen_Is_2_Now.  Now he actually seems like his is in my general industry, so maybe I’ll get some hits….. So I took a look and he is following 4,707 and has 4,303 followers.  Now, I’m not sure, but if you follow that many people, is it even possible to actually “Follow” that many people.  What is the point? is my real question….  I have about 80 friends in Facebook, man, it is hard to follow 80 people you actually know.

Second, my Zen budy has posted 1,041, so he is way more expert about Twitter than I am.  So that got me to thinking, what are some averages of posts?

Guys I’m following.

These guys are in the Media Business…
Leo Laporte (King of Twitter in my mind), he has 132,907 followers and has twitted 2,375 times.
Website Magazine, 3,727 followers, 1,035 posts.
Hugh Hewitt, (He is the king of talking about Twitter on his show) 12,308 followers, and 590 posts.

John McCaine - 919,681 followers, only 487 twitts…. now, he ran for President, and he only got to 487.

Me… the original author of the 12 Days of Twitter… 43 posts.

We got one hit out of Twitter yesterday.   I lost a follower; they probably thought my stuff was not targeted to them.

Other things I noticed about Twitter. We have been talking for a number of years about Web 2.0, and about being more open, or getting your “skin in the game” with the use of blogs.  I was reading something our competition did yesterday, where they used Twitter to exclaim to the world that their newsletter had spelling errors.

Hey, sorry about the two incorrect spellings in this months newsletter. We had a college Professor proof it!!! Not good!

Clearly, going 2.0 should NOT be about pointing out your errors, it should be a way to mitigate or address mistakes that are brought to you by the customer.  You should be following your comments and blogs, and quickly reply to customer’s concerns, not point out your problems if they never noticed.

Twitter Harvesting - I think it is pretty apparent, that Twitter is going to be harvested by the spammers.  I have received a number of emails about joining other peoples Twitter and I have gotten “spammed porn” followers in my followers group. Seems to me, if Twitter isn’t smart, and clean, like “Facebook” seems to be they will end up where “MySpace” has headed, the gutter.