14 DAY TRIAL // This may not be too much of a surprise to many but the day of the sponsored tweets has arrived and in a big way. While there are already several companies offering advertisers a way to connect with enterprising Twitter users and pay for a favorable tweet, the arrival of IZEA’s new Sponsored Tweets platform has taken the game to another level.
The product was rumored to be coming about two months ago and is now finally live. It works like you would expect: brands or advertisers that want to get the word out can choose from a wide selection of Twitter users, even some “celebrities,” who will then take part in the sponsored campaign. The Twitterers can set up a profile at the new site, choose what they want to be paid and then look for opportunities or wait to be contacted by the interested advertisers.
This isn't the first such service to hit Twitter but it does have the advantage of coming from an experienced company in the field, with an established name in social media and one that already has a similar product aimed at bloggers. This, coupled with the number of somewhat known celebrities, either in the mainstream or online, could really provide an advantage to the new venture.
While the ethical side of these types of posts does come into discussion, IZEA is trying to make everything as transparent as possible, asking for full disclosure from its users, in the form of an obligatory hashtag in the case of Twitter. Still there are many who fear that, especially on the microblogging platform, some may not realize that it's a paid tweet and even if they do there is still the question of trust and credibility. Twitter works mostly on the implied trust between a user and his followers and that trust may easily vanish when a follower realizes that a tweet from a person he found interesting enough to follow could be bought for as little as $2.