CATEGORIES
- WEB STARTUPS
- WEB NEWS
- CONFERENCES
- WEB TECH JOBS
- VENTURE CAPITAL
- MICROSOFT
- INTERVIEWS
- ADVERTISING
- VIDEO
- NYC COVERAGE
- ALL TOPICS
- ALL COMPANIES
CONTRIBUTORS
TwitVid Launches SocialAds — You Can Buy Twitter Followers and Retweets
Here’s a twist on typical pre-roll and overlay online video advertising. Twitter video hosting service TwitVid has launched a new advertising platform today called SocialAds. The goal with SocialAds is simple: to get you (or your brand) more Twitter followers and/or retweets of your advertisements.
Here’s how SocialAds works…after creating an account, you setup an ad campaign. TwitVid says they host videos for major music groups including Britney Spears, Justin Bieber, Maroon 5 and The Jonas Brothers. They also work with the NBA and the PGA. The ad campaign focuses either on obtaining new followers or retweeting an ad. The ads are displayed within the videos hosted on TwitVid and you only pay when the desired action is completed.
Bidding will begin at one dollar per follower and seventy-five cents per retweet, with higher bids receiving better placement on the advertising units.
TwitVid notes, “during a private beta test of SocialAds, participating brands received more that 400 new followers in less than an hour. Two percent of those viewers who were shown the advertisement followed a brand.” I have no idea if this would be considered good or not. I think the more important stats would be how many remain connected to the brand after 30 and 90 days. It’s also important to note that most won’t unfollow others on Twitter – similar to how most won’t remove a RSS feed.
Currently SocialAds is running on TwitVid’s main site but the company plans to integrate with partners in the future.
This new launch is yet another reason I continue to suggest that Twitter is just one big advertisement. The idea of buying Twitter followers appears to be a concept Twitter itself is also considering in the near future.
This is really helpful specially in this social media dominating era. As more and more people are joining social networks and getting things they want from them, it has become basic marketing method to all businesses to chose social media marketing. If this new advertising helps to really identify the niche then this would be a successful program by Twitter!
I am not so sure I like the idea of buying followers or buying retweets. We know for a fact that spammers will abuse this to no end. In fact many of the follows you buy may indeed be bots or spammers of some kind.
I think Twitter needs to stick to the idea of folks getting followers because the followers are genuinely interested in the topic or shares common goals with a group of people. Twitter could quickly lose its relevence if it focuses too much on becoming a big advertisement, in fact there would be a mass exodus from it to a service like Google Buzz.
I wonder if people with lots of followers like Ashton Kutcher can start selling off there followers to the highest bidder? I have to say that Google Buzz just sounds like a nice alternative if things start going south over there.