Deranged Penguin

Sponsored Tweets, one of my favorite services, has added some features that increase the functionality of the service for advertisers.

The premise of Sponsored Tweets is simple, and follows the channel model I’ve been talking about recently. Advertisers can treat Twitter as just another media buy by “renting” popular and trusted Twitter accounts. Followers put up with it because it’s Eva Longoria or someone like that, the tweeter gets paid, and the sponsor gets a message out. There are signs that the service is developing substantial traction, and they’ve shown great values and ethical standards. The development of the service has been interesting to watch, and today’s feature improvements are pretty cool.

First up is ClickWatch, which tracks the CPC of individual tweets and creates a hedge against poorly performing paid tweets and a way to capitalize on high-performing CPC products. As an advertiser, you are now given an opportunity to allow retweets for high-click responses. As a tweeter, you can allow retweets on ads that did not really perform that well – it’s scheduled for two days later, so it doesn’t clog your tweetstream. It just gives your audience a second bite at the apple. (This is something of a sensitive topic, but I think the length of time between tweets is key – see Guy Kawasaki’s excellent post on retweeting yourself.)

ClickWatch gives advertisers some security in knowing that the price they pay for a tweet is worth a certain amount of attention. There are reasons to be excited from the perspective of tweeters as well, because you’re giving advertisers a reason to take a chance on you.

There’s also a special 25% bonus for advertiser deposits of $500 or over – so you get $625 worth of tweets with the minimum qualifying deposit. Pretty good value if you have the scratch to give Sponsored Tweets a try.

A final perk for referral program members: if you get a new advertiser to try the service, you get a 5% cut of any completed transactions. Now, we’re talking about $1.00-$10.00 events, here, so it’s not a lot, but hey, it’s something. Plus, the deeper the base of advertisers and tweeters, the more likely it is that people will find sponsorship matches, etc. etc…

So if you want to give it a try (as a tweeter or an advertiser), you can click this handy dandy referral link and get started!