How Much is a Tweet Worth?

These days it seems everyone is on social media. Are you? Famous athletes and entertainers are on social media and they can make a lot of money.  In this activity students study how the number of Twitter followers relates to tweet value. Is the relationship proportional, linear, exponential, something else?

Students create a model and apply the model to determine the tweet value of stars like Katy Perry, Ronaldo, Barack Obama and others. You can also check out more data like this at http://opendorse.com/blog/ Consider starting the activity with the graphic and/or the opening minute of the video clip from ESPN. Since the data is roughly proportional and linear, this activity could be used in a variety of ways.  We could assume the relationship is roughly proportional, meaning 6th and 7th graders could work in the realm of 6.RP and 7.RP with this problem. The data is extremely linear, almost a perfect correlation, so you could use this activity as a way to introduce linear relationships or focus more on building a line of best fit.

For Adventurer members we have an editable Word docx, an Excel sheet with the data and computations, and solutions.