The Tweet to Beat: $3 Per Twitter Follower

Tim Ferriss of The 4-hour Workweek fame has writen about an interesting way to raise money from Twitter, and it’s quite a novel approach, I think. When I first read the title (as tweeted by a handful of users I follow), I thought it was just another one of those Twitter monetization schemes. But on further reading, I realized it was not. The gist is that for every new follower that @timferriss gets for the next couple of weeks, $3 will be donated to US public school classrooms.

For every new Twitter follower in the next two weeks, I will donate $1 to DonorsChoose.org, and an anonymous supporter will match $2, for a total of $3 to U.S. public school classrooms per follower. For now, the matching limit is tentatively capped at 50,000 new followers, though I’m open to increasing it later. 50,000 new followers would mean $150,000 to U.S. public school education, and I hope to double or triple this total with a few twists.

The goal is directly helping 25,000 U.S. public school students in low-income and high-need areas in two weeks. This timeline is half the time dedicated to LitLiberation. My current follower count is, at the time of this writing, 22,782, so we’ll round down and begin the count at 22,500.

$1 multiplied by thousands of potential new followers might mean Tim would definitely be shelling out some dough, but that cost is offset by giving Tim’s Twitter account extra leverage, in that thousands more get to read his updates (unless many of these new followers unfollow after the two weeks are over). And then, of course, it’s for a good cause.