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 »

MyTwitterButler.com has posted on their site that they received a letter from Twitter claiming several violations of the Twitter terms of service.  The details including a PDF of the letter sent to the site owner can be viewed here.  While the site owner claims they are being sued, that does not yet appear to be the case.  In fact, the PDF outlines the various violations this site has in regards to Twitter and their terms of service.

Site Background

A quick background on MyTwitterButler is that they sell a desktop application to help Twitter users get more followers.  Twitter has been known to be against “aggressive following” and it appears that is what they consider this application to do.  While Twitter never clearly defines what “aggressive following” is, it leaves it up to speculation of the developers and users. Looking at the developer terms of service, it simply says:

Do not create a bot to promote mass following. Twitter enables users to find and connect with people. Mass following does not help users find interesting connections. Applications found to be promoting valueless mass-following or following-ponzi schemes will be promptly blacklisted. So please, spend your time developing something that helps users find people with interesting connections.

As you can see, the definition of “mass following” is not clearly defined. However, alot of Twitter activity is based on third party apps that make the use of Twitter more efficient.  What is the real difference if you manually go through the Twitter search to find new users to add based on your interests/keyword opposed to using an application that automates the process for you?  You can save countless hours with the help of an application that does this.  In fact, MyTwitterButler allows you to search for users based on keywords. Therefore, I would think this application could be classified as “something that helps users find people with interesting connections” in reference to the last sentence quoted above. 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 »