Media coverage of Twitter over the last 30 days is valued at almost $50 million (£30 million), a new study has found.

Research by news monitoring service VMS found that the social media website gained around $48 million of free publicity in the US due to promotion in major news outlets.  The firm added that the true figure could be even higher, as it has not taken into account coverage by smaller newspapers.

Around 2.7 billion impressions were received by the micro-blogging service in the past month, something that may interest an internet marketing consultant using the website for advertising purposes.

Gary Getto, vice-president of integrated media intelligence at VMS noted that the figure was "very, very high". "Twitter is running significantly higher than Google and I didn't think anything was more popular than Google," he remarked. The study found that television was responsible for the majority (57 per cent) of Twitter's news coverage, with newspapers contributing 37 per cent and magazines five per cent.

A study conducted last month by researchers at the Harvard Business School found that 90 per cent of posts made on Twitter are made by ten per cent of its users.