Twitter is considering offering a product where users would pay to have their accounts promoted on the website, All Things Digital reported recently. How it would work and whether the users would pay per added follower or a base rate is unclear. Twitter, Peter Kafka wrote, wouldn't comment. If true, the offering would make evaluating the weight and merit of a Twitter follower - not to mention the benefits of a larger Twitter-based campaign - that much more difficult. As it happens it is already difficult enough. Here is why:
Even without a Twitter-sanctioned product to buy followers, some companies have found it easy to skirt Twitter's current rules that forbid such practices, writes Wired Magazine. "Affiliate marketer Jonathan Volk posted charts showing how his purchase of 1,000 Twitter followers from Followers for Sale using its recommended setting that adds followers "very slowly" so as to escape detection, resulted in real followers being added to his account on a steady basis."
The followers are real people, Wired concluded, paid a small fee to follow the company.
You can pay people, even celebrities, to promote your product. Sponsored Tweets notoriously paid the celebrity Kim Kardashian $10,000 per tweet for mentioning certain products to her millions of listed followers, Wired notes, which reports that Sponsored Tweets and its sister site, Pay-Per-Post, have about $10 million in funding, over a million sponsored messages, 400,000 participating bloggers and tweeters, and over 40,000 advertisers. This sub category of word-of-mouth marketing, called sponsored conversations is expected to reach $56.8 million this year, according to PQ Media.
Such campaigns grew 13.9% to $46 million in 2009, despite double-digit declines in traditional advertising spending.
Another example is Virgin America, which recently teamed up with Klout, a start up that "identifies influencers across the social web" to find the most likely Twitter users to give away free tickets from San Francisco or Los Angeles for its latest ad campaign on the site. Which brings us to another point…
Followers and fans clearly have different value depending on their influence. There have been several interesting studies on the value of individual fans and followers; Klout's business model is just one variation of this general them. Klout determines a user's influence by measuring some two dozen variables, including the number of times their comments are retweeted, the size of their Twitter audience, and the influence of those followers. (via CNN). It then gives that data a number on a 0-to-100 scale. Users also get a Klout classification describing their style, such as celebrity. Recipients are not obliged to Tweet about the offer or products (other companies such as Starbucks and Cover Girl use Klout as well). It is akin, Klout and its customers say, to receiving a free sample at the grocery store.
Other studies have been conducted by Sysomos. The firm recently looked at the authority rankings of five celebrities, five social media heavyweights and five media organizations - and focused on the kind of Twitter users who follow these people. It determined while celebrities have a large number of followers, most of them are low authority users. Traditional media sources that deliver a variety of content such as Time.com and The New York Times appear to attract more people who are only using Twitter for information. Sources that specialize in social media - ReadWriteWeb and Mashable, for example, attract users that are more active on Twitter.
Numbers don't count either. Meeyoung Cha from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany recently looked at data from 52 million Twitter accounts - and determined that the number of followers a Tweeter has is largely meaningless, according to the Harvard Business Review, "Popular users who have a high indegree [number of followers] are not necessarily influential in terms of spawning retweets or mentions," she said.
