How much is a single tweet or Facebook status update worth?

Every time you tweet, post a Facebook status update or pin something on Pinterest, you help contribute to that respective company’s revenue. But just how much? Is it possible to express, in terms of revenue, the value of a single tweet, for example?

Backupify, a backup provider for cloud-based data, has done just that. The maths are relatively simple (perhaps too simplistic) but do give a nice indication of each company’s ability to monetise its user base.

Backupify took nine different social networks and services – Dropbox, Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram, LinkedIn, Path, Pinterest, Twitter and Yelp – and calculated, roughly, the amount of revenue each user helps a company earn by dividing each company’s valuation by number of users. Here are the findings;

• Dropbox – $80.00 per user
• Facebook – $118.34
• Foursquare – $40.00
• Instagram – $18.52
• LinkedIn – $104.46
• Path – $12.50
• Pinterest – $28.09
• Twitter – $71.43
• Yelp – $21.21

Facebook is able to monetise its user base greater than any of the other eight services, while Path extracts the least amount of revenue from each user. To get the value of a single tweet or a single pin, backupify divided each company’s estimated annual revenue by the number of entities shared, posted, uploaded, etc, on each service. The results are as follows;

• Facebook post – $0.024
• Foursquare check-in – $0.40
• LinkedIn search – $0.124
• Path update – $0.50
• Tweet – $0.001
• Yelp review – $9.13

So Facebook earns 24 times more per content share than Twitter does per tweet, and Yelp earns 380 times more per review than Facebook does per content share. The maths are interesting but $0.40 for a single Foursquare check-in or $9.13 for a single review on Yelp does seem a little high.