NPR Has 1.3 Million Twitter Followers. How Many Does Your Media Property Have?

Recommended Sources

About Media Industry

BNET Media provides daily industry trends and news coverage with insights for managers and executives in publishing, print, broadcast, film, and online media. In addition to media company profiles, we bring you industry analysis on new partnerships, media products, mergers and acquisitions, labor and cost management, media buying, investments and a host of other important business issues.

I can’t say I’ve ever seen a media organization advertise how many Twitter followers it has — until today — but there’s a first time for everything. As part of a new ad campaign touting how multi-platform it is, National Public Radio (let’s skip the radio reference and just call it NPR) tells us that it has 1.3 million Twitter followers and that one million people have downloaded its free iPhone app. (Damn! If only it had charged!) In other words, NPR is a favorite with the digerati and advertisers, therefore, should advertise there.

While seeing a flagrant touting of a media property’s Twitter followers is, I think, a first, this certainly won’t be the last time that Twitter is used as a way of communicating just how happenin’ one’s audience is. If that means the media property can charge more, than maybe there’s a revenue model here for Twitter. It could get a cut! Problem solved.

Tags: Twitter Inc., NPR, Media Property, Branding, Advertising & Promotion, Smart Phones, Marketing, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, Catharine P. Taylor

Catharine P. Taylor has been covering digital media and advertising for almost 15 years and is a frequent speaker at conferences about media and advertising. She posts daily to BNET Media, writes the weekly Social Media Insider column for Mediapost and also has her own advertising blog, Adverganza.com. Follow her on Twitter or subscribe to the BNET Media Twitter feed.

BNET User Analysis

Voice your 2cents

Web Buzz:

Clout

Seth Godin's Blog - 75 days 21 hours 49 minutes ago

The web knows something, but it's not telling us, at least not yet. The web knows how many followers you have on Twitter, how many friends you have on Facebook, how many people read your blog. It also knows how
Twitter: the Golden Ratio

IntoMobile - 87 days 15 hours 30 minutes ago

I just read a great piece on something called ‘Twitter’s Golden Ratio’, on TechCrunch. It’s a simple enough concept, which revolves around assessing whether somebody is worth following or not. In the emails you receive when somebody decides to follow you, you get three stats: how many followers that person has, how much they have...
Social Media Overload

Forbes - 10 days 6 hours 37 minutes ago

How to decide which social networking applications you should follow
Phishing for Popularity on Twitter

WebProNews - 177 days 8 hours 14 minutes ago

In an effort to build its own popularity, social networking has played largely upon the individual’s craving for popularity. How many friends you have on Facebook, how many followers you have on Twitter, or how many connections you have on LinkedIn can all be perceived as indicators of an individual’s Internet popularity. Just yesterday, a...
Retweetist Discovers Most Valuable Users And Accounts From Twitter

Tech Crunch - 307 days 15 hours 26 minutes ago

If you really think it's not the number of followers on Twitter that counts but how many times stuff gets retweeted, Retweetist might be the right service for you. The application and its corresponding Twitter account are essentially Twitter trend barometers and the work of Mike Sheetal, director of Tokyo-based creative agency...

BNET TalkbackShare your ideas and expertise on this topic

Subscribe to this discussion via Email or RSS

1

Daniel M. Harrison

10/21/09 | Report as spam

RE: NPR Has 1.3 Million Twitter Followers. How Many Does Your Media Property Have?

The question, of course, is to what extent the NPR iPhone APP is being used, and to what extent those 1.3 mln Twitter followers are loyal to the brand (i.e. check in occasionally or click on the tweets). The way Twitter has grown organically, it needs to become a little more sophisticated now in order to generate revenue. For instance, you should be able to divide one page up for media outlets, one for friends, one for biz etc. THEN you could get the kind of meaningful data you are trying to mine for (such as the value of NPR's tweets) to monetize the service.