Stupid ideas
I just wanted to write down some dumb ideas I have floating in my head right now that popped in there as I was looking up a Twitter profile for @theindependent to see if it was worth a follow back.
The account I was looking at was for a sort of upscale shopping center here in Nebraska. Kudos to them for getting on Twitter and the Indy will follow back. But then I started wondering if they were following the paper hoping for retweets of their sales or something. Then I wondered if that was something viable for us. Could we look into charging to retweet a big sales event for a local business? Would the local business – assuming they were on Twitter already and “got” it – be willing to have their local paper, which would hopefully have a large following (most likely larger than the local business’s), retweet them once in a while? Maybe as an upsell?
Or what if, since I tweet manually for the paper, if we had a selection of local businesses who gave us their sales events, lunch specials or whatever for a flat fee once a week, if I tweeted those once in a while. Would that piss off followers? If I made them personable and not like an in-your-face ad?
I know there’s a service or two that automates this process but I think it’s safe to say it’s not wildly popular. I have no numbers to back that up, I’m judging based solely on the fact that between my various accounts, I see thousands of tweets and have yet to see a stream with an automated ad system set up.
I’m wondering if using retweets, or making recommendations of events manually as I do for headlines and outlinking would be a better approach and help monetize it just a little?
Obviously it wouldn’t fly for many papers who don’t have big follower lists, but I wondered about the the big ones like the Chicago Trib or NY Times or Austin-Statesman.
Or what about a “Today’s Tweets Sponsored By…” thing? Name a business in the morning when you start and a few times throughout the day? I don’t think it could be something ad reps sell separately, but again, maybe like an upsell? Buy 2 banners, get one day of Twitter sponsorhip a week?
I know Twitter’s not well-known enough for this, at least in my market. It would be a tough sell but I remember when selling post-its and corner peels was a tough sell and the upsell thing seemed to help.
I don’t know. These were just floating round my head this morning.
Tags: ads, sponsorship, twitter, upsell
Yesterday I was idly thinking that there are some companies I would likely follow on Twitter even if all they were tweeting were ads. Click-throughs for discounts, instant coupons, etc. might make this a small (unpredictable) biz model for some. The idea of the local newspaper making this happen for local companies is probably worth investigating.
huh. Not a bad concept. I’m not sure I would try to roll it in with other ads – package deals are in part what hurt online sales in the first place. Either an advert wants to be on Twitter or not.
I’d do a “TODAY’S SPONSOR: ………” once, maybe twice a day. Say… noon~ish and 4pm ~ish.
You’ve got an interesting way of monetizing twitter. I’m curious to see if anyone takes it up.
The upsell thing was just a thought to kind of get advertisers to look at/think about Twitter. Many don’t know what it is and our reps don’t really know much either. We’ve been able to sell sponsorship of things like our weather page and we’re looking at sponsorship of our daily poll question. Why not twitter too?