If you currently use Twitter, you might have clicked on a viral tweet or two, scrolled down, and saw the author of the original tweet post something about a green tea face peel or something along those lines. There are a few things for sale that typically pop up in these scenarios, such as a stuffed squid you can turn inside out to make look happy or sad, or a galaxy lamp. There is always a link to buy them. For awhile I didn’t understand why I was seeing these. For a while I thought they were just really popular products that consumers felt strongly about. I was wrong. It is, of course, a “new” type of advertising. The people whose tweets go viral are being paid to advertise these products.
It isn’t really surprising. As the digital landscape
changes, advertising needs to change to keep up. It’s well known that on
Instagram, companies will hire social media influencers to sell various
products, whether explicitly in an ad or by having the product in posts. On YouTube,
companies will sponsor videos for popular creators. The same sort of advertising
would have to crop up on Twitter eventually. The biggest difference, to my
understanding, is that in the other cases with Instagram and YouTube, the company
and the influencer have more of a professional relationship. There are often contracts
involved. But with the Twitter case, it’s usually a one-off deal. You go viral
once and a company contacts you, asks you to plug their product below your viral
tweet for some quick cash, and that’s it. Sometimes people will even announce
they’re willing to sell space under their viral tweet by saying something along
the lines of “DM for cheap promo.” Reading that once is actually what tipped me
off to the fact that the product tweets were advertising. It’s not frowned upon
to do this. In today’s “hustle” culture, people are encouraged to take whatever
deals they can for extra money. Making a quick buck off a good joke or witty
observation is fine.
If the Instagram and YouTube promotion deals are official, with
contracts, then the Twitter users making promotions like this are like
freelancers. They aren’t officially tied to the companies or anything, but they
still do a bit of work for them in exchange for money. It’s all part of how advertising
is adapting. Native advertising needs to look more and more like word-of-mouth
advertising. People are more likely to purchase something or try a service if
they’ve seen or heard good reviews than if they just see the advertisement. By camouflaging
these advertisements as endorsements and reviews, the companies are using
social capital they wouldn’t have otherwise. However, it can’t pass for this
forever. People will realize, probably faster than I did, that since the same
few products keep popping up in the same ways, that it’s native advertising. To
my knowledge, the companies using this advertising technique aren’t big companies.
It’s not like Nike or Apple are doing this. It’s companies that need as many
people to see their products for as cheap as possible.
This is an interesting observation, and I would like to see how this pans out in the future. My guess is that the average Twitter user is unlikely to care that much if it does not affect them.
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting facet of social media that I had not considered! I remember a few years ago when some YouTube creators were being criticised for not mentioning that a video was sponsored, and then making it seem as though they just felt inspired to tell you how much they love that hair product/mattress/vitamin/makeup brand. Now, at least on the channels I subscribe to, creators seem to be making it much more obvious that something is a paid advertisement -- it's in the video title, or they'll mention it in the video, or it's in the description alongside a coupon code. I have definitely seen the type you mentioned on Twitter and in contrast, I don't remember ever seeing one that explicitly said it was a sponsored link or that they were being paid to promote the diet pills/neon room lights/cute animal sweatshirts linked in the tweet.
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