Tweetbucks is a service that is currently in closed Alpha testing, but gives you the opportunity to earn money via affiliate links that are automatically inserted into your Tweets. Grey area, dodgy ethics?
In all fairness, the company DOES encourage you to disclose the fact that you may be earning commissions off your friends and followers clicking on your links, if they actually make a purchase.
I think the good part is that you can make some money, with full disclosure. But the bad part is that if this kind of service takes off, we'll see a plethora of tweets plugging this product or that product, in the vain hope that quantity sells, and not quality.
Personally, I like to recommend blogs, sites, people, services and products on Twitter because I think people will like them or find them useful, and not to make a quick buck.
I still believe the only real way to make money in social media is to invest in your reputation -- that will pay dividends over time.
Hi John,
ReplyDeleteLove the photo :) At TweetBucks we also agree that building your reputation is key and we encourage full-disclosure. Obviously if you saturate your tweets with product links then you are going to be unfollowed very quickly. We feel this is an automated system that should augment (not change!) the content you already produce.
Ultimately we are not doing anything that cannot already be done today (you can insert affiliate links into your tweets now), we are just massively simplifying the process.
Ultimately the responsibility is in the hands of each user to disclose. Hopefully we can help build some best practices around disclosure of affilaite links on Twitter.