I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of days now and what we really need is a Twitter affiliate ad network like service. I often post tweets about products I like or things that I find interesting. In most cases that is valuable to those companies. I’ve done some small tests with my twitter account @futileboy and found that my click through is very high for each post about 7% of my followers click my links. Which is a much higher number then online ads get. Of course that’s because my links are not always trying to sell something. On twitter if you stop being genuine the people see that and stop following you.
Aside from all that, it would be great if there was service for users of twitter to make a little money off of their recommendations. What I would like to see is a service that’s sort of like Google Adsense, but instead of suggested ads, a user would type in the product they are about to promote and then if available receive a URL with their code and the clients in it. along with a short URL version that’s easy to post to Twitter.
Companies could go one step further with this, on demand adverting, and even offer discounts to top influencer’s followers. Which in turn would give the tweeter more street cred. Just imagine a tweet from someone you follow pointing out a product you’re interested in and a discount if you click the link now. This may be just enough to push someone in to purchasing.
Would this service get abused? OF course it will. However the natural filtering process of over advertising will ultimately make authentic influencers stand out.
Sure it’s a little evil, but if someone is willing to pay for it and someone is willing to take that money in the offer then the service should exist.
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Couldn’t you do this now if you set yourself up as an Amazon affiliate and then used Amazon to show all of the products? I agree that it could get a little spammy.
You could if the product you wanted to talk about was available through amazon. I was thinking along the lines of BMW has a new car and built a portal site to showcase it. You really think this car is amazing and want to tweet about it. Via some aggregated network you could link to the site and get money for click throughs just like online ads work.
The trouble with the Amazon solution is that people have to buy the product. There’s no revenue for awareness.