Think Twice About Selling Advertising in Your Twitter Stream

There are several companies set up specifically to buy and sell ad space on our Twitter accounts. In most cases you sign up and agree to let them feed their pre written ads into your Twitter stream. What they are willing to pay you for that privilege depends on how popular you are and how often you tweet. It was recently reported that Kim Kardashian receives as much as $10,000 for some paid tweets even though she denies the claim.

The screen shot below illustrates why you’ll want to be very careful about what service you use if you decide that this seems like a good way to make some extra cash. Most of the services I’ve checked out provide a way for you to select general categories that you’ll accept ads from but don’t provide a way for you to specifically choose the advertisers.

I’m quite sure the person who’s account this tweet was sent from didn’t actually send the tweet. For one thing, the account holder is male and his Twitter page is used to provide information about online marketing, it’s not a typical spam account that you would expect to see this type of thing from. My guess is that he’s using an advertising service to insert paid ads into his Twitter stream and in this case, the ad does not fit his audience and actually linked to a porn style dating site.

My guess is that he’ll be hearing complaints from his followers, probably lose several, and will shortly be posting an apology if he’s smart. If he’s real smart, he’ll dump the ad service and find other ways to make money.