Recently I learned that celebrities are being paid to tweet for certain companies on the popular social networking site Twitter. Since its creation in 2006, Twitter has gained popularity worldwide and is estimated to have 190 million users, generating 65 million tweets a day and handling over 800,000 search queries per day.It is sometimes described as the "SMS of the Internet". This shift from celebrities on TV commercials and billboards to social networking sites is no surprise in this age of technology. But the main question is: Are paid tweets really effective? In my opinion, paid tweets are no more influential than a comercial on television. According to John Bell, "weaken the overall value of social media which relies on trust first not reach". The only person really benefitting from this new trend is the celebrity. The fans aka "followers" are being used and deceived by the celebrity. We follow them because we want to know what is going on in their lives, not to see our timeline filled with advertisements. Vice-President and Co-Founder of ad.ly Derek Rey reports that they did over 22,000 endorsements on Twitter in 2010
and did not have one single negative event. He also stated that celebs such as Kim Kardashian and Justin Beiber average over 18,000 clicks per tweet. The heavy traffic Kardashian recieves allows her to be paid $10,000 per tweet.In an article I read by Eric Sherman, he argues that "paying for tweets is an activity for idiots".
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