Earlier today I ran out of milk. It happens all too frequently. It’s not very exciting. But that doesn’t stop me tweeting about it. Anyone who follows me on Twitter will be acutely aware of the fact I tweet some incredibly inane rubbish.

Today though, someone was actually reading me tweets. Cravendale Milk, or more likely someone from their internet/PR/social media provider, has clearly set up some sort of listener to watch for people who mention milk, and then they reply with a little advert for Cravendale and a link to an online discount voucher. It’s quite an obvious thing to do but it’s fun and entertaining at the same time. I don’t imagine it requires much capital investment either.

As I was amused by the fact they replied I posted again, this time to tell my followers what they’d done. And that’s when Twitter’s networking effect started to become quite noticeable. There were retweets. And retweets of retweets. And retweets of retweets of retwe.. well, you get the idea. I thought it might be fun to do a little investigation to see just how far Cravendale’s offer of a 50p discount voucher might have spread.

The original message was reposted by 6 people, and then subsequently retweeted by a further 4 people. Adding together the number of follower than I have, plus the 6 people who retweeted me, and the 4 who retweeted from them, gets a total reach of 23,712 Twitter users. This ignores the number of people not following those 10 accounts directly but who would still have seen the tweet on Twitter lists that follow any of the accounts involved.

Of course, that doesn’t mean nearly 24,000 people saw Cravendale’s brand. A percentage of Twitter accounts are dead, some others aren’t viewed regularly, some people will have ignored the tweet, and so on. Conservatively though, it’s not unreasonable to think that Cravendale’s PR team managed to get their message out to several thousand people this morning for the cost of watching Twitter and replying to someone positively (and a 50p voucher).

I still need to go out and buy milk though. Someone should invent a way of delivering it by the internet.