Sponsored Tweets, an IZEA company formerly known for “Pay Per Post” that paid bloggers to write about specific products has moved into Twitterdom. Sponsored Tweets offers Twitter users the option of sending their followers messages that hype brands or products. The chosen Twitterers get paid based upon a flat-fee per Tweet, or the number of clicks that their Tweets rack up.

Mashable described Sponsored Tweets method of doing business;

The Sponsored Tweets platform works by giving advertisers the ability to create campaigns and select, invite, and approve Twitterers of their choosing to participate in their sponsored campaigns. On the flip side, Twitterers can set their pay rate and find opportunities to tweet on behalf of advertisers and get paid per tweet and/or click.

Similar to its blogging program, Sponsored Tweets will carry disclosure in the form of a #spon hashtag. In other words, if someone is being paid to tweet about a product, it will be disclosed, assuming that users follow the rules. Read the rest of this entry »

It was only a matter of time, but Twitter recently released an announcement regarding the correction of follower/following counts.  According to their post,

For some time, the follower and following counts we display have been incorrect for some folks. We’re soon to push a change that will address this issue. This means that the count you see in your sidebar should match what you see on your follower and following pages.

However, a consequence of this change is that follower counts will drop for some people. In particular, those with large followings may see significant changes as we correct for spam accounts and data inconsistencies. No legitimate followings should be affected—we’re just cleaning up artifacts in the system.

So if you notice a drop in your number of followers…no need to worry, you did not do anything wrong.  It is just Twitter trying to clean up some accounts that don’t belong or are not appreciated by the Twitter community. Read the rest of this entry »

OK, let’s clear something up…if you see a tweet on Twitter and the source is listed as “From API”, there is no need to disown that Twitter user as a “bot”, “spammer”, or anything else negative.  While some users might very well be those terms, it is unfair to label all users who have tweets “From API” as fake users.

From the looks of most users concerned with what “From API” really means, nearly all jump the gun and assume the worst…that it is a “bot” account.  Do these users even know what an API is?  From what it looks like, they do not.  For starters, everyone should check out Twitter’s offical page regarding API use and what it is.  This can be found here.

So Why The Hate for “From API” Tweets?

Twitter recently implemented a change where programs who do not list a source parameter in the tweets will be defaulted to post “from API” instead on what it used to be “from Web”.  So what is now happening is programs who do not list a source and are not registered as an application with Twitter will now display the source in tweets as “from API” instead of “from Web”. Read the rest of this entry »