Sponsored Tweets? Okay so I’m a little late to the game but I’ve just come across this while checking out the Google-Shoemoney legal showdown. This is interesting but also a little slimy. So let’s say I’ve got quite a following to my twittering. For a price I could tweet about a topic dear to the paying party’s heart. Say you’re Ashton Kutcher…I know I know but just go with me here. I know 1,000,000+ nimrods that follow Ashton are pretty darn likely to check out whatever he says might be cool. So say I’ve got an iPhone app I want to push. I have Ashton tweet about my app and the math is simple: Followers x Click Through Rate X Conversion Rate x Revenue – Celebrity Tweet Fee equals your profit.
I don’t know of anything that Ashton could recommend that I’d be interested in. But what if a search marketing guru said, “The latest optimization tool from XYZ Corp is awesome. Check it out the free demo.” There’s a good chance I’d click the link. The point is that social media should be about community interaction with as much bias removed as possible. In the case of sponsored tweets it’s nothing more than another advertisement and should be identified as such. Each sponsored tweet begins with “Adv” so I can filter them out. I get enough garbage in my email. Why do I need it in my Twitter account?
In the Shoemoney post it seems to be a CPM basis for the tweet fee. What about those who have fewer followers, tweet less oftern but when using analytics on their tweets have higher click through rates? Shouldn’t those be the real influencers and charge more for better relevancy? Smells like Adwords 2004 all over again.