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Comment by Scaevolus | Hacker News Reader

> Kohl’s gave out 1,000 $20 gift cards ($20k total), but the ad got 10,812 retweets. According to an estimate from the data analytics company SumAll, the value of a branded retweet is $20.37. So for a cost of $20k, Kohl’s got roughly $220k in value — about 10x its investment.

There's no way a retweet is worth $20-- or is this some weird power-law effect?

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That statistic comes from social media marketers who like to overstate the value of social media. In reality, most of the people doing that retweeting are simply using fake twitter accounts to do the retweet. I do the same thing. No one reads my retweets lol

These social media marketers make it sound like kylie jenner is going to retweet your crappy contest. Never happens.

That mis-valuation is striking at the problem's heart: a branded retweet is worth real value while a dummy account which only retweets brands is worthless.

A single retweet can be worth several tens of dollars under twitter's ad program, depending on targeting. The pricing is really fucky.

Disclaimer: Twitter's ad program is atrociously bad.

who on earth retweets an ad, though?

Exactly, which is why so many companies have transformed their professional corporate accounts into "sassy" viral sensations. Wendy's is fast food burger joint, but have millions of Twitter followers and high engagement because of their unrelated humorous tweets. Ads are starting to look less and less like ads every day.

What would the power law effect look like here? 0.1% of branded retweets being worth $20,000?

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