Poynter Online recently had an interesting article about advertising and social media. They discussed how some companies are now buying ads through a news agency to go out to all of their followers on Twitter. I can see some benefits of advertising in this way, but still think it is premature and won’t be successful in the long run.
My opinion could stem from not using Twitter myself, but I don’t think Twitter has developed enough to be a successful outlet for advertising. I do think it is marketable to small businesses that may not be able to afford a print ad, but the cost doesn’t seem high enough to really be making anything other than pocket change. I think in order to make any money from this type of advertisement there would need to be tweets every hour from different businesses, but this ultimately defeats the purpose of the Twitter feed. People are following the news agency to get immediate updates about local news and I believe followers will get annoyed quickly when the ad tweets start taking over the news tweets.
Small businesses are smart to use news agencies Twitter accounts to advertise though as opposed to their own Twitter because the news service will have a diverse group of followers that can bring new customers. For example, if a restaurant had their own Twitter account only those who already knew about the restaurant would follow them and learn about the special deals. Buying tweets from a news site gets your special deal out to a much more diverse audience that has the potential to bring in new customers.
To learn more about this concept read here: http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=101&aid=176228
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