Last weekend at the Consumer Electronics in Las Vegas, LeVar Burton beamed a different kind of tweet on his 1.57 million followers: “Be the 1st to own a NEW Sony bloggie camera RT for a chance to win #SonyCES http://bit.ly/6OccaR (ad).” This message is a paid advertisement arranged through one of several startups that have discovered pay-per-tweet as a way to cash in on the popularity of Twitter, which included a link to electronic’s company’s Web site. Depending on the number of followers or their influence, advertisers like NBC Universal, Microsoft and Sony lined up for campaigns that pays users a few dollars to $10,000 per tweet.

Sean Rad, a 23-year-old chief executive of the Ad.ly Inc., a company that gained publicity by bringing advertisers to celebrity tweeters such as rapper Soulja Boy Tell `Em, who has 1.9 million followers, Burton and model-actress Kim Kardashian, who has 2.7 million followers, said „Twitter is the evolution of the Web page. Content is shifting from static pages to the stream. Everyone from CEOs to celebrities to random joes are all producing content. If there’s anything that Ad.ly has shown, it’s that the largest influencers on Twitter have an interest in being compensated for the value they’re creating for the ecosystem.”

You should know that San Francisco’s Twitter Inc. Was founded in 2006 and now has more than 60 million users worldwide. Although executives said that they will introduce some form of advetising this year, the company is allready making profit through income from search engine deals. Other firms like Sponsored Tweets of Orlando and MyLikes of San Francisco have launched services to broker ad deals between Twitter users and sponsors and they are supposed to be marked with notations like “(ad)” or “#ad” to comply with new Federal Trade Commision guidelines. Depending on how MyLikes rates their influence or relevancy to the sponsor they receive 20 cents to 80 cents for each click-through on ad links but in turn they pay Twitter to post one sponsored tweet per day.

Rad said that one Ad.ly campaign started with 37 tweets but generated 10,000 re-tweets in two days and the company that was launched in September is already cash-flow positive. Another interesting announcment is from Chief Executive Officer Ted Murphy: “that don’t have humongous marketing budgets and can’t afford to hire a PR firm, but can afford to spend a couple of hundred dollars to get their name out on Twitter. Someone with 100 followers can generate as many click-throughs as someone with 100,000 followers.”

The Seattle-based tech blogger Pirillo,who has 74,000 followers on Twitter had the Sony ad in his stream but he denied potential sponsors saying that as long as they fully unveil what are they doing, Twitter influencers can tweet ads as long as they want.

Pay Per Tweet