Online Observations

Monetizing Twitter – a review based on experience [ May 5th, 2010 ] Posted in » Make Money, Twitter

A number of people used to blog in the past just so that they could make money. The same is quickly becoming true on Twitter. There are so many Twitter accounts that churn out just automated tweets, and participate in all kinds of services to generate followers. Well, there is good reason for it. If you have anything over a 100 followers on Twitter, you have a good chance of making money on Twitter. Actually, you stand a better chance of making money on Twitter is your followers are organically grown (i.e. if they became your followers because they liked what you tweet, or you were referred by someone as a great person to follow). The reason is that such followers are likelier to read what you tweet, and click on links that you tweet.

So, how do you make money on Twitter? Mostly it involves making a sponsored tweet – yes, you get paid for a tweet. How do you get paid? Well, you sign up with services which allow you to do that. There are tons of these services. Some are of course fraudulent, and others are not so well paying. I tried my hand at this, and shortlisted this to three services which seem promising (one of which has already paid me twice). Below are short and sweet reviews of these three services, as I see them.

The first one (and the one I doubt the most) is called Magpie. My observations for this service are:

• It auto-tweets to your account – set it, forget it. Although, you can set it for pre-approval so that you go and approve each tweet, but you can also set it for auto-approval.
• It allows pay-per-tweet model. So, you actually get paid per tweet.
• The drawback is that you can only cash out once you reach $50.

With Magpie, in less than a month, I have already accumulated $5.09 (as of this post), and it has tweeted out about 22 tweets for this amount. That is a good amount of earning. However, the moment of truth only comes in if you get paid. There are reports of people who have gotten paid, and there are reports of people who said that Magpie declared their Twitter accounts as violating terms, and so cancelled their payments. So, I don’t know what would happen with my account. I don’t think I am violating their terms of service, so let’s see.

The second one (and the one I don’t doubt as much, since its by a company which is well known). It’s called SponsoredTweets, by a company called Izea.Here are my observations on this service:

• It works just as some of the other Izea services work – you get invited to opportunities (I got about 4 invites in the last month). If you don’t respond to the opportunity, then it can expire. So it does not auto-approve for you. Once you accept an opportunity (you can negotiate the tweet price), you write your tweet, and then wait for advertiser approval. Once the advertiser approves, SponsoredTweets tweets out the tweet you wrote on your behalf automatically.
• It is a pay-per-tweet model.
• You can only cash out once you reach $50.
• The good thing is that you can set your own price. So, if you have a lot of followers, you can charge a higher price per tweet.

In 4 tweets, I have accumulated $1.95 in my account. The good thing is that I am certain, that i will get a payout whenever I make it to $50. Izea has a very good track record of payment (and I have been paid by them before while using PayPerPost and SocialSpark).

The final one and the one that is the best so far is called MyLikes. This is a very new company on the scene, but they are great. They have an overall StumbleUpon like model (not entirely) where you can basically create a ‘like’ for anything in the world. And that is what you do on the site. I love to spend time on it. However, part of the model is that you can create “Sponsored Likes” which you can then tweet out to Twitter, and then get paid for it. Here are my observations:

• It is a pay-per-click model, primarily. So every sponsored like has a link, and you get paid for the number of clicks that link generates. They do have a pay-per-tweet, but you hardly every see campaigns which are pay-per-tweet.
• It only allows you to send one sponsored tweet every day.
• It pays you weekly – yes weekly, every Friday.
• The minimum payout is $2. Yes that is two dollars.

In the last month, I have been paid twice, with the third payment expected this weekend. Below is a screenshot from my PayPal account showing one of the payments from MyLikes. In total, I have made a little over $12 from MyLikes so far.

So, as you can see, it is not a bad service to be used.

There are many other our there, but I have decided to stay with these three. Between them, I get a maximum of 2-4 paid tweets in a day, and that helps me keep the paid content to a relatively low percentage, since I send out about 20-30 tweets a day on average. If you are going to check any of the services out, I request you to use the above links since they contain referral information which helps me out, and it doesn’t harm you any.

Also, if you would like to follow me on Twitter, then click here.

Update (Jun 21, 2010): Well, I have been into these services a bit longer now. I thought I would update this article a little. Of the three services I have reviewed above:

• MyLikes continues to excel. I have gotten a payment from them every week. Once again, you can sign up with them by clicking here.
• SponsoredTweets continues to accrue money for me. After a certain while, I got access to Pay-Per-Click as well. There are always some opportunities available. I tend to use the PayPerTweet opportunities more, though those are not available as often. To sign up, you can click here.
• Magpie has been a disappointment. I have not received a tweet from them in over 12 days. I have a little under $15 just sitting there which I can’t withdraw till I reach $50. I will update this post if this situation changes, but I am not keeping my hopes too high.

Aside from the two above, I finally decided to try out another service called RevTwt. I have only tweeted from it twice so far (again trying to keep sponsored content to a minimum in my stream). But, they always have a fairly large inventory of ads to tweet from. I have heard a lot about them, so I am going to keep my hopes up for this system.