Bloomberg Camp Paid to Help Build Twitter Followers

So, how did Mike Bloomberg’s recent NYC mayoral campaign score all those Twitter followers? Well, he may have gotten some help from Sponsored Tweets, the pay-per-tweet service from IZEA, the company that brought us PayPerPost and SocialSpark.

I spoke with IZEA CEO Ted Murphy, this afternoon, and asked whether any political advertisers have used any of the company’s services, including its 3-month-old Sponsored Tweets service. Well, it turns out none other than social media campaign stud Bloomberg ’09 used the paid Twitter service.

The system works a lot like IZEA’s SocialSpark service for social media pages (actually, SocialSpark encompassed paid tweets before the Sponsored Tweets service launched). Basically, advertisers offer paid-tweeting opportunities to tweeters (they have over 25,000 according to Murphy) that fit their criteria. The system allows advertisers to track the number of people a message reached and clicked, and which tweeters delivered the highest ROI. All paid Twitter posts require disclosure; tweeters can choose from a handful of disclosure options such as “brought to you by,” “advertisement,” and “#ad.”)

By the way, Bloomberg’s Twitter followers were around 12,000 a few days before the November election, and are up to around 14,500 now. Yet – and I think this is a downfall of many political campaign related social efforts — there have been no posts to the account for nearly a month.

If you’re interested in learning more about what the Bloomberg camp did online, check out my October ClickZ News story.