Celebrities
A while ago, Grumo Media, an interactive media agency, blogged about how Ashton Kutcher tweeted a link to their video. Keep in mind that Ashton has 6 million+ followers and Grumo's (awesome) instructional videos don't usually expect much hits.
From Grumo:
The chosen ones, the ones people follow in the millions, own the levers that influence our tastes, opinions, minds, and time.
Think about this, Ashton spent about 5 seconds writing the PadMapper tweet and that effortless act sent 13,000 people to go watch a 1:41min video.
So getting geeky to the max here, a single Ashton Kutcher Twitter second is worth a quarter of a million fan seconds!!!.
If there was some kind of human second stock market, Ashton stocks would be a great investment for sure.
I am investing in Ashton Kutcher Twitter Seconds (AKTWs) right now!
2 years ago, Kim Kardashian was worth $10,000 per tweet with 2 million followers. Currently at 6.3 million followers she is among the elite influencers on Twitter. Rapper 50 Cent encouraged his followers to invest in some penny stocks that helped him earn a pretty penny. Is social media the next channel for advertisers to exploit celebrities' mass followers? I think so. Imagine if I got Justin Bieber to tweet my blog.. that would be something that would make me an instant fan =)
Influencer Marketing and SEO
The power of Twitter accounts with huge followings can work wonders for driving traffic and now even provide some horsepower to drive SEO results. With the influx of social media web apps, there are always influencers that dictate users on how they use a product or what actions they should take (such as clicking on a link). With this new level of influence over followers, being the "popular" person may pay off in dividends.
If SEO companies who are undergoing a linkbuilding campaign managed to get popular celebrities to RT (ReTweet) a link, it may instantaneously create thousands of linkbacks.
Though not explicitly known or even proven, early case studies show that Google indeed takes into account links from Twitter (even if they're short-linked or masked by services like bit.ly for instance). Facebook even has some influence on Google it seems.
That got me thinking about why advertisers don't target influencers on a smaller scale to cash in on corporate sponsored tweets. A quick Google search and I found this website:
I wonder what the payouts are for celebrities using services like this. Even on a "normal person" scale, the "popular" Tweeters from certain regions or industries can be swayed to participate in these so called Sponsored Tweets, sort of like guest blogging or sponsored posts.
If you had organically massed a huge Twitter following, wouldn't you want to get paid to Tweet certain links from advertisers? It's easy enough for the Tweeter to do and gives instant results for advertisers.
The Darkside
The new "darkside" of SEO now lies in social media. The amount of spam on Twitter must be staggering due to the ease of profile creation and automated Twitter bots that "farms" followers automatically. I'm curious to see how Twitter actually handles these types of profiles and how Google considers them in their mighty algorithm.
With us on topic of being on the "darkside," imagine if these celebriy accounts are amassing thousands of fake profiles to increase their followers count to appeal more to advertisers. How would advertisers know if these followers were legit or not? It would be nearly impossible for them to verify this.
For $10,000 a tweet, I wouldn't mind farming a couple million followers. The tools are out there, the tactics are proven, but what will this mean for how search engines rank links from social media websites?
Going Viral
On a smaller scale, the following video Razor Swag got 56k views in 9 days thanks to the power of Twitter and other social media sites.
(Great Glidecam work by my friend Vinny from Imperial Video Productions.. Imagine having to skate, hold a camera, and keep focus all at the same time..)
The video's viral success is in part due to the plugged Tweet by Fox's TV show [H]OUSE Director and Executive Producer Greg Yaitanes. Greg has a following of 296k+ and contributed to the accerlated hits to the video.
And with all this said, like many authors say after writing articles on the Internet, follow me on Twitter.
