Please re-tweet about this!

I bought something at Amazon today. All by myself too. Aren’t you proud! As I reached the “Thank you” confirmation page, I noted that Amazon had given me the easy option of “tweeting” about my purchase of one particular item. I assume that manufacturer had paid a little extra to have their product featured.

I immediately thought this was great idea. I had thoroughly researched this little product (an inexpensive knife sharpener if you must know) and would have happily told the world about my smart purchase. I also latched on that my small online business, where I am a partner, could benefit from this. I dashed off a note to the marketing folks urging us that we too should take part in this massive movement to social media marketing. Clearly the experts weren’t wrong, this is big folks.

Or so I thought.

After I tweeted my purchase, I wondered, “How many other people tweeted about their purchase from Amazon?”. I quickly went to twitter.com and started my search. My god, there were thousands of tweets. I was getting excited about the prospects. Perhaps I had found easy street in the world of online marketing. But how many of these tweets were in the last 24 hours, I wondered.

Amazon user’s tweeted about their purchase 332 times in the last 24 hours and the average for this week is 288 times per day.

Is that a lot, I wondered. Since I enjoy simple math, I quickly google’d, “How many orders a day does Amazon get?”.

Well, my friends, Amazon on any given day processes about 250,000 orders in the US. During the Christma s season, things can get out of hand and Amazon will sell about 73 items per second during those days. But let’s mostly worry about today.

So if you assume Amazon sold it’s usual 250,000 orders today and got 332 tweets. This works out to 0.1328% of customers who actually bother to tweet about their great purchase. This doesn’t include the ability to post on Facebook, but let’s say it’s the same %.

So for all this great noise about social media being the next (or current) big thing it’s hard for me to get excited about 0.26% of my customers tweeting about my great online business.