Celebrity Tweets
Harnessing star power
Paying a celebrity thousands of dollars to promote your company in 140 characters or fewer may seem crazy. But a growing number of businesses are setting aside marketing dollars to do just that. Best Buy recently tapped reality star Kim Kardashian to tweet about its cell phones, for instance, and Microsoft hired entertainment mogul Diddy to tout its mobile tagging service, Microsoft Tag, to his legion of Twitter followers. Any company can snag an endorsement from a star using services that connect advertisers with tweeters—for a price, of course. influence—and was impressed to see she scored a 78 out of a possible 100. Some quick online research revealed that she worked with SponsoredTweets, a WebThe goal: Encourage based platform that more college students connects advertisers to register on the site with celebrities and offers online analytic The execution: Figuring tools for gauging the an endorsement from success of campaigns. a star would grab the Revsin logged on to attention of college the SponsoredTweets kids, CampusLive website and submitted founder Boris Revsin the tweet he wanted started exploring the Lohan to post. The idea of sponsored service contacted the tweets this summer. starlet and, about He held a focus group three weeks later, she with students to find agreed to publish a out which celebrities slightly tweaked verseemed most influen- sion of the tweet for tial, and Lindsay $3,530. To hedge his Lohan’s name kept bets, Revsin browsed coming up. Revsin SponsoredTweets’s checked the starlet’s listings and requested Klout score—a rank- a second tweet from ing of social-media rapper Jim Jones, The Company
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CampusLive, a Boston-based website that lets college students earn rewards from sponsors by playing online games
who charged $1,950. Revsin paid for the tweets on the site and requested they be published on the same day in August. Within a day, some 4,500 people had visited CampusLive by clicking on a link to the site in Lohan’s tweet (“These challenges for college kids on #CampusLive are SO addicting! Have u checked it out?”).That number was lower than Revsin had hoped, but he was impressed with the conversion rate: Five hundred of those visitors went on to register on Campus-Live, and many of them are now regulars. Jones’s tweet (“College #Vampires brought to you by the #CampusLIVE payin hom-
Tweeting With the Stars
How much will you shell out for a celebrity endorsement? Below is a sampling of stars for hire on the Sponsored Tweets platform. Fee per tweet Number of followers Lindsay Lohan
$2,353 2,472,484 Mike Tyson
$3,250 851,168
Frankie Muniz
$208 119,789 JWoww
$2,353 1,549,310
Jose Canseco
The result:
$3,900 400,475 Tyrese
$4,550 1,595,225
Soleil Moon Frye
$5,850 1,449,763 Khloé Kardashian
$8,235.50 2,856,036
Lance Bass
$134.33 104,288
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