I don’t think I know of anybody who hasn’t heard of Twitter by now.  And I’m not necessarily trying to say that everybody is Tweeting and actually using its micro-blogging service – I’m just saying we can’t deny the words, “Tweet, Twitter, and Follow,” are all over the media these days.  Whether it be something completely ridiculous, like Ashton Kutcher’s race to one million followers, to real-time up to the minute citizen journalism – Twitter is everywhere.  Even 104 year old, Ivy,is Tweeting.

In a report published today by, news-monitoring service, VMS, Twitter has received 2.73 billion impressions in the past 30 days.  57 percent of these come from television, while the rest come from newspapers and magazines.  

What this means, is that all these mentions of Twitter throughout the media add up to $48 million in pretty much free advertising for the company.  

AdAge spoke with Garry Getto, VP-integrated media intelligence at VMS.  Getto remarked, "This is huge. It's very, very high…In fact, we looked at online coverage of Twitter vs. Google. Twitter is running significantly higher than Google and I didn't think anything was more popular than Google."

Based on the report, Fox News gave the most value to Twitter, and CNN mentioned it more often. The San Francisco-based startup has proved itself a widespread medium for human communication, specifically the sharing of news as seen in plenty of examples this year – Hudson River plane crash, Presidential Inauguration, the Iranian conflict and the list goes on.  

VMS put these values into perspective saying that in comparison to Twitter, Microsoft’s Bing only added up to $573,834 with a mere 63 million impressions.