Comments on: Twitter Advertising: Pay-Per-Tweet

By: Brandi Williams

Brandi Williams — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 02:52:37 +0000

I once believed in paying for tweets. I even told a friend to stop giving away free advertising in the form of Tweets and get paid for them. Then I thought about it not as a business owner, but as a Tweeter, friend, follower. I don’t believe in ghost tweeting and in essence that is exactly what this is. It is someone else tweeting as me…but I am getting paid. Just as Jude states, it is ethically wrong to do without telling anyone, but even if you provide full disclosure it is wrong. It compromises the relationship that you are trying to build. Social media at its very best is about engagement. In my opinion (expert and humble), it’s not about the quantity of tweets, how many followers you have or how many people you follow. Tweeting is about developing relationships, engaging with people in a new way. It’s about sharing information and helping build a community without boundaries. It has business utility because it allows businesses, organizations and individuals to be transparent and helps people develop relationships…the kind that can lead to sales, brand loyalty or a good friendship.

By: Arnold

Arnold — Fri, 15 May 2009 11:26:55 +0000

Taking up Luke’s comment… if you only did one recommendation of that store then there’s really no issue whether or not you were paid in some way after the fact. However, what if that payment were to encourage you to do further tweets along the same lines either for that store or for others? I think then it would be a different matter and for transparency in that case you really should be tagging any such series of posts in some way as sponsored or whatever.

However, if you think about it we all constantly see advertisements for products that aren’t tagged as such every day. For example, when it’s an Apple computer used in a show that’s almost always because Apple have paid in some way for it to be there and that’s the case for most (all?) branded products that you see in popular shows or movies these days. I’m quite sure that Nokia paid quite a bit to have a mockup of a Nokia phone in the recent Star Trek movie for instance.

The problem with any preselection scheme that a twitter based campaign would have is simply that the payments to the twitterer are so small. Bear in mind that whereas a sponsored blog post can pay, say, $10, a sponsored tweet could be down to under 5 cents. Thus if you were to spend, say, a minute going to the site, reading the ad and approving it you’d be talking a payment of around $3 an hour and, of course, many tweet payouts are less than that which doesn’t stack up too well compared to a sponsored blog post payment of something like $20 to $30 an hour for an average blog.

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 08 May 2009 21:10:53 +0000

If you are interested – paypertweet (dot) com is for sale. Goto to the webpage and click the sedo link. You can make an offer there.

By: betweeted

betweeted — Fri, 01 May 2009 15:51:59 +0000

The only problem with be-a-magpie is it’s auto-tweeting… which, sure, you can turn it off, but the people who shamelessly spam Twitter won’t, so it’s just a technology that propagates spam. Check betweeted.com.

By: Jude Fiorillo

Jude Fiorillo — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 17:01:00 +0000

I think that’s an interesting idea Luke – and I bet you’d be happy to receive a simple thank-you, let alone any financial compensation – a coupon/discount would be a nice bonus though! I think the key here is that the recipients of your tweet received some kind of value from your broadcast (a sale!) But it wasn’t just any sale, it was a real deal, and it took you as an individual to be able to communicate that, so the message didn’t become lost with the million-and-one other ‘deals’ out there. I think that if we could include that added human filtering/touch to online ads, as briefly mentioned in my original post, the level of ad relevancy would go up substantially, and the right message would (be more likely to) go to the right people.

By: Luke Grange

Luke Grange — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 01:52:16 +0000

Massively interesting and current topic, Jude. I know just yesterday I tweeted about a sale I went to at a retail outlet (locality was important) where the outdoor wear was a real steal. I know my Tweeps (audience) really appreciated it. What if the retail store was a member of a brokerage which monitored the #store tags and then contacted me and thanked me on the stores behalf with a discount token.