Tweetwasters - December 15, 2008

I've never been a huge proponent of Twitter, nor am I an avid user of the product. I do recognize the value Twitter provides individuals & brands , however, there is a distinct problem Twitter faces, mass adoption. That being said, Twitter has been successfully used by all sorts of people and brands and companies to help communicate their message, but was it really worth the time and effort?

A newly birthed piece of Twitterware has been developed, and its purpose is to show how much time someone has spent tweeting. The way Tweetwasters calculates this number is by taking the amount of updates someone has posted, and then multiplying it by 30 seconds (the big caveat is that it assumes it only takes 30 seconds of time to tweet). Tweetwasters will then let you know how many hours of your life you've spent tweeting, as well as how you rank amongst the rest of the Twitter population.

It's a cool idea, especially if you try to use it to determine ROI for any brands or companies that have a presence on Twitter. AdLab had a great break down of the Comcast Twitter feed (ComcastCares):

"ComcastCares is run by the company's director of digital care who makes, let's say, $50/hr and has written 20.719 tweets in ~173 hours. Total time investment into Comcast's Twitter account is $8,650. The account has 6,001 followers, which results in $1.44 per follower"

It's an interesting attempt at giving marketers an idea of what it costs to get a follower, however, it neglects to measure the additional sphere of impact a brand generates by having a focused and relevant feed on Twitter (however, that may be impossible to ever do).