Editor’s note: This article was first published in October 2010. Paid retweets are described as just the beginning and not yet available in Spanish-speaking countries. Twitter has since become X, and its monetization has changed completely.
Twitter is something more than a social network. In fact, I wouldn’t even dare to call it a social network.
As we’ve discussed before, Twitter’s creator has probably been asleep at the wheel when it comes to figuring out how to monetize the network. Companies and users, on the other hand, are already doing good business. Users provide a service, and companies get a return in exchange for a smaller investment. Here we explain what’s happening and how a user can make money with Twitter.
1. What is a company looking for? Advertising: making itself known and reaching as many people as possible.
2. What are most Twitter users looking for? The same as most people who don’t use it: they want to make money easily. Now that’s possible just by retweeting, that is, sharing someone’s tweet or message with your list of followers.
3. The selection. Whom are companies choosing to pay in this way? Obviously, they’re choosing people with a large list of followers, although they already start paying from 500 followers.
Depending on the type of company, there is talk that a single retweet has been paid as much as 500 dollars. Of course, that person had 230,000 followers, a large majority of them fans of the product the company was advertising. What’s logical and normal, within what they are paying, is usually between 2 and 15 dollars.
This is only the beginning, so you know what to do: go and get followers on Twitter, because it will soon start in Spanish-speaking countries too. As for me, with my 31 followers as of today, I’d better look for another source of income 🙂
Further reading
Featured image: Håkan Dahlström, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
