It’s not the most shocking piece of news to discover that Twitter gets a lot of media coverage. But what is shocking is to hear quite how much monetary worth there is in that media coverage. The question, of course, is whether this attention will last or whether Twitter will soon be superseded by the next big thing.

Not a week goes by when Twitter isn’t mentioned, profiled, or talked up either in a national newspaper, on a talk show or news program, or on a Web site (or 2,000) somewhere on the Internet. The last few months have seen Twitter move from being a niche service few people knew about to a mainstream social network in the same vein as Facebook and MySpace.

This sort of media attention is fantastic for a relatively new start-up, and it’s actually got a measurable monetary advantage for the company as well. According to news-monitoring service VMS, Twitter has generated media coverage which would have cost the company a cool $48 million just in the last month.

As reported by AdAge, Twitter managed 2.73 billion impressions in the media over the last 30 days. Each impression counted is a mention of the company in the media, be it on Oprah or in a newspaper column. TV coverage contributed 57 percent of the impressions, newspapers 37 percent, and magazines 5 percent.

As an example of how Twitter compares in the free PR department to other companies, Microsoft’s new Bing search engine only managed a media coverage value of $573,834 from 63 million impressions. Which is why Microsoft has to advertise while Twitter currently doesn’t.

Gary Getto, VP of integrated media intelligence at VMS, said:

This is huge. It’s very, very high. In fact, we looked at online coverage of Twitter vs. Google. Twitter is running significantly higher than Google and I didn’t think anything was more popular than Google.

However, as big news as Twitter is at the moment, this level of buzz is unlikely to last forever. Growth is already slowing as the amount of people interested in joining the site starts to level off. And even if it does carry on, as with everything tech-related, there’s always the next big thing just round the corner.

Twitter should enjoy its moment in the spotlight because it’s unlikely to last too much longer. Once the celebrities start getting bored, and the novelty value starts to wear off, the media will drop the micro-blogging service like a hot potato. Just like it did with Facebook. And MySpace before that. And Friends Reunited before that.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 at 12:31 am under Advertising, Internet, Opinion, Social Media.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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