How much Is a Twitter follower worth?
While everybody wants a concrete answer, but the reality is that it depends.
How much value you place on followers will impact the eventual answer, so it’s best to start with your own goals or needs.
- How many Twitter followers do you want or need?
- How much do you expect them to give back in return for whatever it is that they’re giving you?
- How valuable are they as a symbol of your success, and how valuable are they as an actual customer?
Once you can determine these factors determining how much each follower is worth to your business (or not), then it’s time to look at the various ways of monetizing a Twitter account or a social media account more broadly.
Nonetheless, we’ll look at some estimations below.
Table of Contents
The value of a Twitter follower in the influencer world
A good proxy is by looking at what companies and marketing agencies will pay so-called influencers (or thought leaders or whatever the favored term) per post.
For each Twitter follower, that comes to around $0.003-$0.005 per follower per post.
It depends on the niche, of course.
If you’re in the finance niche, it’s probably going to be a bit above that number because the average customer simply spends more in things like finance and insurance.
If you’re in a lower-key niche where people don’t spend much money (e.g., drawing cartoons), then you’re going to be toward the lower end.
So if we use those figures we can start to tabulate an answer. (And it should also go without saying that these followers should be real, not fake or bot followers, which aren’t worth anything. It’s also easy to determine if followers on an account are real or fake.)
How many Twitter followers do you need?
That is, how many Twitter followers do you need before they become viable leads and customers and start giving back in return for the value that they getting from you?
That’s something you’ll have to determine. It’s based on engagement.
Once you get above 1,000 followers on Twitter you’ll start to notice that many of your tweets start to get immediate traction.
Within the first few minutes of a tweet (assuming normal hours), you should get some likes, retweets, and maybe even some replies.
Of course, it depends on the type of tweet.
If you ask for replies you could get more replies than likes. If it’s a simple “good” tweet you’ll probably get likes but not many replies.
But generally, your Twitter account will start to find its groove at somewhere between 1,000 to 3,000 followers.
It’s at this point you’ll notice that your Twitter account has monetization potential.
For example, if you share an article to your blog, you’ll get clicks and that’ll be valuable in the ways that you monetize your blog.
If you promote a product from Amazon, those clicks will probably turn into sales and at least some percentage of them will convert.
How much are 1,000 Twitter followers worth? How about 10,000 or more?
Let’s take a look.
How much is a Twitter account with 1,000 followers worth?
Applying the math, it would be worth about just $3-$5 per post.
That’s not much. But at the same time, it also means if you were to do one sponsored post per month, that’s $36-$60 per year.
So an account with this type of activity might be valued at $0.03-$0.05 per follower per year.
When you’re around the 1,000 followers mark, your Twitter account won’t be much of a moneymaker in all likelihood.
But let’s say you valued each follower at $0.05 per year and valued your account at a 3x annual multiple.
That means each Twitter follower, in terms of selling an account, might be worth $0.05 * 3 = $0.15
So you might consider selling a 1,000-follower Twitter account for $150.
How much is a Twitter account with 10,000 followers worth?
Now we multiply by 10x.
A sponsored post might be worth $30-$50 each for an account in the 10,000 followers range.
Done once a month, that would come to $360-$600 per year.
Using our math above, a 10,000-follower Twitter account might be valued at $1,500.
But this, of course, all depends on what you’re using it for.
At 10,000 followers, you should be able to attract some serious eyeballs and engagement on Twitter.
So for one who plans to use Twitter frequently, a 10,000-follower account is valuable and might be considered worth much more than only $1,500.
How much is a Twitter account with 10,000 followers worth?
Multiply by another 10x.
A sponsored post might be worth $300-$500 each.
Done once a month, that would come to $3,600-$6,000 per year.
How much is a Twitter account with 1 million followers worth?
Another 10x.
A sponsored post might be worth $3,000-$5,000 each.
Done once a month, that would come to $36,000-$60,000 per year.
Not too shabby.
The power of online communities
At first, a Twitter account doesn’t have any value.
It takes a lot of work to build authority and a point at which you get traction, people start engaging with your content – liking, retweeting, sharing, clicking on link, etc.
But once it’s setup it provides something very valuable.
Elon Musk has even used Twitter to pump his stock, pump-and-dump cryptocurrency, and even use it to commit securities fraud.
So, for him, he has the power to use his tens of millions of followers in a far more lucrative way than someone who doesn’t own a company or a product or service of any sort.
That’s the kind of power that can enhance your brand and business.
The numbers you can do are going to rise as your follower count rises.
How to monetize your Twitter account: Create your own product or service
Offering sponsored posts has value, but if someone is advertising with you, that means they’re probably making money.
This is why it’s helpful for people to design their own products or services to monetize their audience.
Even wint (@dril), a comedian on Twitter, has his own book that he wrote as a way to monetize his large follower base.
It could even be a podcast, a blog, a YouTube channel, newsletter, or something else.
If you don’t have one yet, you could always develop it.
Example
If you do have a product and an audience of 10,000, let’s say you sell that product for $20 each.
If you get a 0.25% opt-in rate among your followers, that’s 25 people.
So you sold $500.
If you have 100,000 followers, that’s $5,000.
You can imagine all the permutations.
And the goal in business is to always resell to the same customers over and over again.
So as you pick up new followers and turn them into customers in various ways (new products, new services) and resell to the old ones, that should add up over time.
Conclusion
Social media might allow you to go viral here and there and develop your base that way.
But more likely you will need to work hard over a long period of time and produce great content people that provides value to people so they come back over and over again.
For many, participating on social media was just a way to have fun then grew into a business itself.
But no matter how you get there, social media is a big part of modern business strategy and a big opportunity for people who know how to use all that it has to offer.
