What is Sponsored Tweets?

Sponsored Tweets is a Twitter advertising service that matches tweeters with advertisers. It allows marketers to hire both celebrity and long tail twitter users based on categories, keywords and other data. Twitter users tweet out messages on behalf of the advertiser in a transparent and honest fashion. SponsoredTweets.com is a self-service platform.

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What makes Sponsored Tweets different from TwitThis and Magpie?

Compared to other Twitter advertising services that were launched before it, Sponsored Tweets is not only well funded but it also learned from the mistakes and weaknesses of its competitors by adapting transparency, ethics and employing the help/services of celebrity Twitter users.

To get a closer view of how it works, I’ve signed up with Sponsored Tweets and this is how the control panel looks like:

As a user, you can set the price/amount you charge per tweet or click, select the ad type, your tweet category (business, entertainment, technology), specify content type (everyone, mature, adults only), define keywords and set up the notification settings. The user can accept or reject offers or opportunities from advertisers. If the user decides to accept a certain offer, the user’s account will be credited within 24 hours after the tweet was sent. Once the account accumulates a minimum of $50, the user can then withdraw the money.

Transparency, Ethics, Disclosure

Disclosure is 100% mandatory. Sponsored Tweets require all advertisers and tweeters to include a disclosure phrase to their tweets. Sponsored Tweets goes an extra step to ensure 100% disclosure by using an automated disclosure engine. Below is a video on how the automated disclosure engine works:

Celebrity Tweeters

One of Sponsored Tweets’ strategies is to use celebrity tweeters to endorse and use the product. Such celebrities include Kim Kardashian, Playboy Playmates Holly Madison & Kendra Wilkinson, comedian Carrot Top, chef Bethenny Frankel and web celebrities like Chris Pirillo, Neil Patel, Jeremy “Shoemoney” Shoemaker and John Chow just to name a few.

My Take:
If you ask me, Sponsored Tweets and the likes only work for Tweeters who have a large following and have a certain level of authority on a certain niche. Even if you have a large following and even if you’re a celebrity, not all of your followers will want to click on a link especially if they know that it’s a sponsored tweet.

Although earning extra income would be a nice idea, I’ve stayed away from these type of services from the first time they were introduced. I’ve already deactivated my account on Sponsored Tweets. Like I said earlier, I only signed up for an account just to have a closer look on the system and I have no plans of reactivating it. I’m not saying that this is bad and that you shouldn’t use it or sign up with them. Its just a personal preference of mine and I want it to stay that way.

How about you guys? What do you think of Sponsored Tweets? Would you sell sponsored tweets on your Twitter account? Would you click on a sponsored tweet link? Please share your thoughts.

What happened? I had no idea. It’s normal for the number of my RSS subscribers to drop 10 readers at a time but for it to lose 65 readers overnight was weird. Since I don’t know what the reason was, I couldn’t do anything about so I thought to myself that I’d just wait until tomorrow and see what happens.

Later that afternoon, I got John Chow’s RSS feed via email and saw the title of his latest post – “How I Lost 4,993 RSS Subscribers Overnight“. I immediately knew that what ever reason he had for losing that much subscribers was the same reason I lost mine. From John’s post, I found out that the culprit was Google’s Feedfetcher and that it wasn’t showing the number of RSS subccribers using Google Reader. Btw, I’m sure John is happy that this didn’t happen during the RSS competition vs Shoemoney. Hehe

Though John Chow showed proof that the culprit was Google Feedfetcher, I still wasn’t sure and I wanted to confirm it so I decided to pay the Feedburner blog a visit and saw this Saturday Subscriber Count Drop?

If you saw your subscriber count drop precipitously in your Saturday, November 3rd summary from FeedBurner, the reason is that specific subscriber stats from Google Feedfetcher were offline because this service was apparently out late with friends on Friday night, and well, it completely slept through Saturday. It appears to have rallied, however, and amid firm declarations of “I’m never doing that again”, Feedfetcher has started diligently reporting subscriber numbers to us, early this morning Pacific Time. FeedBurner publishers’ subscriber counts should be closer to what you’d normally expect starting with reports that will be available on Monday morning.

There ya go! That explains everything. Good to know that it’s just temporary and that things should be back to normal on Monday morning.

Anyone else got worried by the sudden drop of RSS subscribers n the Feedburner chicklet? What percentage of your total RSS subscribers use Google Reader? How about you, do you use Google Reader? Share your thoughts!

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If you have any questions or comments regarding this weekly feature or if you want to suggest a certain link or post for next week’s roundup, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Enjoy your weekend everyone!