In today’s NY Times article Tweeting for Dollars, Pradnya Joshi introduces and reviews Izea’s new service allowing people to tweet advertisements and get paid. This follows Magpie & Friends service creating new advertising networks on Twitter. With Izea, they require the tweet to use a hashtag with #ad, or something similar, at the beginning of the tweet. So now we can promote other brands and make some money.
Twitter users who sign up to send ads to their network of friends and followers will get paid based on various individual metrics, such as a person’s reach on Twitter, the ratio of friends to followers, length of time on Twitter and, of course, the number of followers. An active Twitter user with 10,000 followers could make $25 to $35 per commercial tweet, Mr. Murphy said.
Neither of these services matter. One of the beauties of Twitter is that it is an open network (unlike Facebook which requires me to accept you as a Friend or LinkedIn with the same policy). Each of these structures has its uses. The open platform of Twitter creates a great deal of churn, but that churn is the beauty of the service. If someone is sending lots of Spam (make $1 million on Twitter, my secrets for just $59.99), you just “unfollow”. As many people have articulated, social currency is build upon trust. If I offend , spam , don’t engage, or simply don’t interest a follower, they will abandon my tweets quickly enough.
The critical issue is consistency. If you regularly tweet about your life and loves and then start tweeting me about your brilliance as a social media expert, your lack of consistency results in zero credibility. Alternatively, if you regularly send out tweets with coupon and discounts (check out the new CheapTweet’s service that aggregates all these tweets), I know what to expect and I am following you for a reason. It is my choice!
If someone regularly tweets advertisements, and they do so authentically with products they truly support, I won’t be offended. If someone is just trying to make money off of their list of followers, they will be abandoned quickly enough.
Tags: Interactive, Strategy, Tweet, Twitter