Imagine posting a short blurb on your Twitter about the snack you’re enjoying and getting a check for $10,000 a few days later from the company that made it. For some celebrity tweeters, this is just another lucrative financial endeavor, as more and more companies have turned to Twitter to capitalize on the high visibility and low-cost advertising opportunities. A faceless print ad in a magazine is dated and boring, but a verified celebrity account on Twitter just happening to be using a certain product in real time adds a kind of credibility that other advertising outlets simply can’t match. But since some of these tweets aren’t even marked off as advertisements, they end up being misleading and insincere ‘- and they prove that American consumers are fools for celebrity name brands.
It’s a silly idea that only works ‘- and only generates the incredible amount of revenue it does ‘- because celebrity followers on Twitter make it work. These average people on Twitter are the same ones who offer free advertising for thousands of companies and media every time they tweet about it, and don’t get paid for it. There are always several copyrighted trending topics available on the site’s home page ‘- whether they are products, movies or new albums. It’s gluttonous and quite telling of the baseness of the current American capital system that celebrities are getting paid thousands of dollars for faking something that average Twitter users actually do and do for free.
It’s not unexpected that advertisers would pounce on this kind of media, especially social networking sites since they are so heavily integrated with everyday life and have the novel benefit of having average consumers doing all of the work themselves for free that advertising companies would otherwise have to do at a cost. What does come as a shock is how easily advertisements can now blur the line between ad and reality. With the incredible social resources offered by Twitter comes also ample opportunity for corporate America to profit, in some of the unlikeliest ways. These new Twitter ads will only add additional junk to the Internet while further padding the pockets of some of the nation’s wealthiest celebrities and corporations. It’s up to civilian tweeters to resist, lest Twitter become just another online sensory overload that gets taken from the regular people who made it huge and corrupted by the corporations who want nothing more than to brand it, sell it and ultimately damage its original appeal.
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