Get Paid to Tweet

Regular users of social networks like Twitter acquire followers on a one-by-one basis, they then use those connections to share their opinions and links to the latest news of interest to them whether that be commercial or personal. It is possible also to “buy friends / followers”, although Twitter generally have steps to prevent this if they’re made aware of it.

Social Network systems are based on trust and loyalty, and as such, they present a massive opportunity to marketers who want to encourage those traits in their customers. People are more likely to trust people or companies that have lots of friends and followers, so the incentive clearly exists to artificially inflate those counts — and a cottage industry is emerging to help them do just that.

Celebrities, especially the Z listers are making the most of this and in some cases charging up to $10,000 per tweet they push out in front of their followers. One example is Kim Kardashian who has 2.8 million followers, another is Z Lister Celeb Samantha Ronson.

In addition, because real friends trust each other, marketers (or indeed Celebs cashing in on this) try to insert themselves into those conversations by offering product discounts or cash when people mention brands in messages to their friends. Suddenly, “friendship” is as ripe an area for product placement as music videos, movies or general consumer products.

If clout is the new currency, it already has its share of counterfeiters.

Just to be clear about it, Twitter and Facebook are hardly overrun with this sort of thing, but who knows how this will eventually culminate. Another question is around how many popular Twitizens may have paid for some percentage of their followers. Nonetheless, as the cat-and-mouse game between social networks and social networking marketers escalates, that could change.