It doesn’t matter how much effort you put into writing a witty tweet – it’s still pretty much worthless. Each one is worth just $0.001 (£0.0006) in cash terms according to online storage firm Backupify. So it’s lucky for Twitter that the world is addicted to tweeting.

The maths was done by the company’s co-founder Rob May, who wanted to discover how much value users create for some of the world’s biggest social media companies.

He explained on a blog that the calculation was based on publicly available information ‘to figure out what social data, which social media companies, and what social media actions are the most valuable’.

The companies he looked at included Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp, Path and Foursquare.

He turned the results of his number-crunching into an infographic that set out how much individuals are worth to each company, how many users it would take for that company to make $10billion and how much each social interaction is worth.

From this he was then able to work out how many more users each company would need to hit a $10billion valuation.

Then May divided their worth by the number of interactions they received to value them individually.

The contrast was striking with tweets worth $0.001 (£0.0006), Facebook status updates $0.024 (£0.015), Yelp reviews $9.13 each (£5.733) and professional searches on LinkedIn $0.124 (£0.077).

He told Bloomberg Businessweek: ‘The reason that Yelp reviews are valued so highly is that every review creates lot of value for other users.’

He admits, though, that some media companies are over-valued, so perhaps internet users should tweet that the figures are, after all, fairly rough.

Elite.