Earlier this year we wrote, somewhat seriously, about people like Kim Kardashian getting paid thousands of dollars to tweet about advertisers’ products.

According to a Yahoo! research scientist, that money might be better spent elsewhere.

Which means if you were thinking about leveraging your millions of followers for personal gain, maybe rethink that strategy.

Researcher Duncan Watts found that targeting a lot of smaller Twitter users with far fewer followers would yield a “much, much higher ROI,” Jeff Jarvis writes.

And of course, the smaller the fish, the less it costs to reach them. There is probably some point, far after the $10,000 for Kim Kardashian, not so far after bloggers earning 74 cents per click, that your value as a conduit for information/ads becomes zero.

If marketers do decide to target thousands of people with just a small circle of friends, you can cross “twitter spokesperson” off your list of possible job descriptions. Jarvis does note, though, that Watts found that a combination of mass marketing and long-tail (Kim Kardashian and you) is effective.