Sponsored Tweets Enrich Celebs

Kim Kardashian pimps products (excluding sunblock) from her Twitter account (photo courtesy of her Twitter)

Kim Kardashian gets $10,000 just for mentioning the name of a product in one, single tweet. Rapper and producer Soulja Boy gets the same, a cool ten grand every time he sends out a sponsored tweet. Other “stars”, like Audrina Partridge of The Hills, and celebrity blogger Perez Hilton also make in the high four figures or more for every sponsored tweet they send out.

It’s all because of a couple new-ish start-ups, led by a company called Ad.ly, and another called Sponsored Tweets, who are cashing in on the fact that these celebs have an avid audience who is going out of their way to read every Twitter update these celebrities post. They find the companies, like Sony, Nestle and Microsoft, who are willing to pay for endorsement of people who are famous for nothing other than being famous.

So how can you get in on the action? Well, it helps to have upwards of a million followers on your Twitter account. And actually, there area a couple people who aren’t famous, but who are making thousands of dollars per paid tweet, just because they’ve racked up hundreds of thousands of followers. Nice job if you can get it.

And the folks at Ad.ly are quick to point out that in most cases, the paid tweets sent out by their clients are differentiated from non-paid tweets, with text that says either “ad”, or “sponsored”. They also add that they encourage their celebs to send out paid tweets very infrequently, to avoid irritating their followers.

Whatever you think about yet another form of advertising, it looks like this one is here to stay. Of course, it’s not exactly hard to avoid… unless you really, really  need to know what Kim Kardashian has for lunch every day.