Poultry Enthusiast Wins £12,000 Bet Through The Power Of The Retweet

Here’s the premise: Twitter is a waste of time.

To test this statement, the guy who runs the Twitter account for poultrykeeper.com and its group of websites bet his boss that he could get 10 retweets on a single tweet. The deal was that every retweet would be worth 50p but if the employee failed to reach the magic number of 10 retweets, he owed the boss £10. He ended up getting a few more than 10.

24,000, actually.

And now his boss is totally backing out of the bet (of course).

If you aren’t aware, poultrykeeper.com is a small “hobby site” run by “poultry keeping enthusiasts.” On the site, you can find articles about keeping chickens, ducks, turkeys and much more. Here’s how the Twitter guru describes the experience on the poultrykeeper blog:

I went away for the bank holiday weekend and when checking my twitter today, found a few more than 10 re-tweets…. In fact, there are so many I couldn’t count them.. I was completely gob-smacked. There were a few people who had replied to me and said this was a scam and I can see how this looks and I’m sure it has been done in the past to get tweets, others on the other hand made some fun comments and joined in.

So, technically 21’000 x 50p is £10’500

Actually, according to social intelligence site Topsy, his original tweet has garnered at least 24K retweets at this point. That means that his boss technically owes him closer to £12,000 – but it doesn’t look like he’s paying up, so I guess that’s a moot point.

Let’s go back to the original premise that started the bet: Twitter is a waste of time. What does this prove?

Well, on one hand, the thing got 24K retweets. That’s a lot of exposure, plain and simple. But how much of that exposure is actually just mindless retweeting because a Twitter user saw something funny? I mean, what did this really do for poultrykeeper.com?

For one, it gained the Twitter account about 1000 new followers. But then again, I’m sure productivity around their office was zapped due to the attention payed to this little stunt.

How powerful is Twitter when it comes to brand marketing? Can thousands of retweets really generate sustained buzz for a product or company? I’m sure the boss at poultrykeeper.com can no longer say that Twitter is a complete waste of time.