Bloomberg Camp Paid to Help Build Twitter Followers

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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.