Will Sponsored Tweets Taint Twitter Forever?

Aug 28

Will Sponsored Tweets Taint Twitter Forever?

Posted by: Jed Young

While some forms of paid Tweeting have been around for a while, IZEA has recently made waves with the announcement of the most impressive platform yet for monetizing your Tweets - Sponsored Tweets.

While Social Media Marketing purists cry foul and vow to immediately stop following anyone who posts these vile 'paid tweets', I say 'bravo' to IZEA for empowering those who offer value and entertainment to the masses through Twitter to GET PAID.

To you Social Media Marketing fussbudgets, how is this any different than Google Adsense ads in a blog (Twitter is a micro-BLOGGING service); or TV Commercials in between segments of your favorite TV show? As long as these 'Sponsored Tweets' are labeled as such and come between multiple regular Tweets, I see no problem with it. You may be SHOCKED to find out that consumers (and even Tweeple) will likely find some value in the offerings of these paid Tweets. If these types of advertisements had no value, we'd have no Google and no TV. If you don't like them, just ignore them or 'fast-forward' through them.

Before you discredit and write-off paid tweets forever, you may want to see if Geoff Ogilvy's followers would be interested in learning more about his Special Edition Puma Golf Shirts that your client is selling.

If Twitter offered this themselves (and they will), would you Twitter evangelists be so disapproving? Might as well get used to it, because Twitter is going to want to make money eventually. Isn't that what all you Social Media Marketing experts are trying to do? If not, I have a few campaigns for which I could use your free services.