Charlie Sheen's Next Twitter Move: #Advertisements
Promotional tweets by the actor will appear "very soon," according to Ad.ly exec.
Charlie Sheen may have #tigerblood coursing through his veins, but he’s about to have advertisements in his Twitter stream.
Promotional tweets from the Hollywood actor’s account will start appearing “very soon,” Derek Rey, Ad.ly’s co-founder and VP of media, told ClickZ on Thursday. “We can let you know in about 24 hours,” he said. “We are only 24 hours into this, and I have never seen anything like this from a demand standpoint.”
On Wednesday, his company helped Sheen launch his Twitter presence, which has since exploded to 1.3 million followers. Rey said Ad.ly received 20 calls from advertisers – many in the entertainment vertical – before his Los Angeles-based shop opened this morning.
“The phrase ‘ringing off the hook’ – it’s beyond that,” he said. “We’re talking about the top [level] of advertisers …Charlie’s the biggest billboard in America right now.”
The VP continued, “If you compare it to the ground-breaking Old Spice campaign…In two weeks, they had 92,000 followers on Twitter for Old Spice. Charlie Sheen is doing that in less than two hours right now. The amount of engagement Sheen has from a media standpoint…the American people are paying attention.”
Rey said each tweet by the actor is generating between 400,000 and 1.4 million impressions. While his team hasn’t tracked sentiment with algorithmic software, he suggested advertisers would like the engagement the actor commands. Sheen’s rambling self-commentary on news programs inspired the hash-tag “#tigerblood,” which has been a worldwide trending topic since late Wednesday.
“It’s overwhelmingly positive what people are saying about him and tweeting back to him,” Rey said. “It’s just incredible how much people are interested in him.”
Seventeen-month-old Ad.ly facilitates celebrity endorsements for brands on Twitter and Facebook. The company has placed 24,000 endorsements for brands like Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Toyota, American Airlines, Best Buy, Cover Girl, AT&T, and LivingSocial. Five-thousand celebrities are on its platform, which Rey depicted as a publishing venture.
“Our model has become the most efficient way to advertise on Facebook and Twitter at scale,” he said. “We just started doing click-through metrics on Facebook, and we are averaging between 5 and 10 percent for Facebook posts.”
