Twitter gets criticized on a regular basis for not having a business plan. But the point of a business plan is to bring in money, and it turns out that, at least in terms of marketing expenses, Twitter doesn’t have any financial needs. A report claims that the company’s received $48 million in free media coverage over the past 30 days.
VMS, which specializes in news monitoring and PR measurement, came up with the large sum. Apparently television contributed to about 57 percent of it, newspapers supplied 37 or so percent, and magazines were good for about 5 percent.
Gary Getto, VMS’s vice president of integrated media intelligence, also made clear to Abbey Klaassen, “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.”
So everything looks fantastic for Twitter from one perspective. The only problem will be if all of this free coverage fails to do it much good. Since there’s not much more anyone can do to promote the site, fans might be right to worry if not a lot of people are coming to embrace it.
There’s also a question of how long Twitter will be in the spotlight. VMS CEO Peter Wengryn said, “Twitter seems to have a higher sizzle today than any of its peers. But for long term, we don’t know if this will be sustainable or whether there will be another that comes to displace it.”
