Monetizing your Twitter Feed

So many people have been trying to figure out how Twitter as a platform is going to monetize its’ service. Not long to follow is how individuals can monetize their Twitter feeds. I’ve spoken with a few people (I won’t name any names) and they are monetizing Twitter the good ole fashioned way, not with a service/plugin/or any other feature. They are simply selling ads based off of offline transactions and manually posting ads as updates through their own Twitter account. Some marked as Ads, some that aren’t. These type of updates walk a fine line of actually being ethical since your followers don’t necessarily opt-in to advertising when they choose to follow you. Needless to say this type of activity can seriously affect your credibility if it backfires.

Services like the newly launched Tinker are positioned to develop a twitter ad network and do a revenue share with those micro-bloggers that are apart of the network. Cool. Magpie is a network that is actually very similar to Tinker except it will push ads based off of relevant interests and not specific events.

I’m sure Tinker’s network will evolve to this eventually as well. Though it would make more sense for Twitter to add this service to their platform. Like Adify for Twitter except owned by Twitter. Someone like Markus or I could easily create our own Black Micro-blogging Network on Twitter then, lol!

So what IF you want to do it all on your own? You have your own website or blog and want to offer advertising or allow people to advertise their Twitter presence to your audience…ethically. An alternative to try is Twitter Brand Sponsor ads by Socialable Ads, a product from Mashable. The concept is actually very simple and can be implemented (sans any bugs or tech issues…we had some when trying to use it) very quickly if you are on a Wordpress platform. What Twitter Brand Sponsors allows you to do is still monetize (if you choose) the Twitter accounts of brands you WANT to be associated with. There is no forcing advertisements through your Twitter feed and on to your followers, thus no worries about keeping your cred.

If you choose to offer this type of sponsorship or advertising here are few things to keep in mind no matter how you decide to implement it:

Don’t go all MySpace on your Followers.

Force feeding ads and random promotions is not cool and negatively impacts you or your brand and the receivers experience with the product. Instead, introduce advertisements into your organic conversations.

Don’t be a Snake.

Mark an ad as an ad and a sponsor as a sponsor. Misleading your followers could alienate your readers and ruin your brand.

Keep it Kosher.

Stay relevant, authentic, and genuine.