Become a direct advertiser
When a twitter user has a large amount of followers, that user is extremely valuable to companies looking to advertise themselves and reach a large amount of people. MyLikes was developed by some ex-Google employees and was officially launched in January, 2010. Advertisers ranging from companies to individual people looking to increase awareness create a short advertisement and provide MyLikes with information on their target audience. Then, anybody become an “influencer” and tweet customized ads on behalf of the advertiser, while MyLikes pays a certain amount of money per click on the ad. The more followers and influential one is, the more each click is worth. According to MyLikes, some of their social publishers make over $40,000 per month!
Sponsored Actions
Instead of going through a system like MyLikes, Sponsored Actions eliminates the need of an intermediary. An advertiser will directly contact an influencer and ask them to tweet a message promoting their contest. People will be entered into the contest if they follow the advertiser, re-tweet the tweet, comment on the contest webpage, or a combination of the above. This way, the influencer receives a healthy reward for letting the advertiser use their followers, while the advertiser’s message reaches many people.
Increase sales on website through direct linking
Got an e-business website selling products or services? Tweet links to individual products, interact with followers and increase sales through awareness. Peter Payne runs an online business called J-List, which sells Japanese products from food to clothing. To direct traffic to his website, he accesses Twitter’s user base through using hashtags targeted towards his target market. This way, he uses Twitter as a medium to direct traffic to his actual store, resulting in increased sales.