Be a Magpie Review: Pay per tweet
Dec 3rd, 2008 by Casey
Twitter is the most popular micro-blogging platform and is drawing attention from marketers looking to take advantage of the system. While Twitter has yet to announce a revenue model, services are popping up looking to take advantage of the reach it can provide. Be-a-magpie is one of the first to try.
I wanted to give be-a-magpie a whirl and see how quickly you could set it up. I decided to try and market a site most people on Twitter would never write about to see how the crowd would react (and to see if they would even notice). I went to the campaign creation page, input ‘lawsuit’ into the keyword field and then clicked a few of thier suggestions that automatically propogated the field. I then added the title ‘lawsuit funding’ and then filled in the ad text ‘http://www.lawsuitfunding.com for Plaxico”, hit save and the ad went pending. The site requested me to add funds to my newly created account through a provided paypal link (the paypal link goes to the german site and the text is in German). After adding funds to my account I waited and checked the time, 3:30pm it took about 2 minutes all told. Here are a few screen shots of the process.
The site did take some time to load once I hit save but it eventually went through.
I am curious to see if anyone picks up on the paid tweet ‘http://www.lawsuitfunding.com for Plaxico’ as it should be pretty easy to spot and at the same time keeps in line with some current news regarding the New York Giants wide reciever, for those outside of the US he is a sports athlete who recently shot himself in the leg.
After 17 minutes the ‘waiting for approval’ section updated to approved and it looks as though the campaign is live. An email also was sent to update me on the approval.
Two Hours later the system still shows as 0 ads served. Anyone out there see the spot yet? If not I will need to adjust the budget to kick this off more.
3 hours and nothing yet…
It will be interesting to see how this takes off and if it gets any traction. I could see this violating twitters TOS as well as twitter account farms popping up to facilitate lots of spam.
Any updates on the progress?
I think I have seen a few sponsored tweets here and there but so far it hasnt taken away from the service. I wonder if twitter themselves could do the same thing say 10% of all streams carry a sponsored tweet, this way they could take advantage on the need.
I looked around and couldn’t find those spots. Did you have any issues with the campaign?
After trying a few times with 50 pounds I was unable to get any paid tweets going.
From an advertiser standpoint this service fails at what it promises.
Believe me, it’s not only advertisers that have felt that wrath of poor service from Be-A-Magpie. I’ve been with the program(as a publisher) for over 4 months now and have only seen about 5 to 7 tweets. If this service really wants to take off they’re going to need to improve on their consistency and advertising service.
I heard about a company called cash4tweets.com – it pays people on twitter (with a lot of followers) to tweet about a product. Eg. If Microsoft comes out with a new product, they will pay someone with 50k followers to tweet about it.