Seeing the huge success of the previous social media debate on scheduling tweets, I have decided to make it a regular feature. These posts will act as forums to discuss issues that concern us and that are very part of our social media.

One such issue is Twitter Monetization (Making Money via Twitter). Let’s start with a little story:

Twitter started as a medium to communicate with friends. Soon, it became popular among web enthusiasts and bloggers. People started sharing links they liked and soon twitter became a really powerful blog marketing tool. Bloggers used it to gather traffic and to get more retweets.

Seeing the potential in twitter, people started thinking about monetizing twitter (after all advertisers are looking for easy traffic).

The first one to start it was magpie. It payed twitter users on the basis of the number of sales made or number of clicks made on a specific link. This monetization scheme received a very good response from people who were interested in making an extra buck while doing the thing they love. A number of such monetization schemes started as a result of the great response they got from the users. To name a few:

• Sponsoredtweets – It is the leading in this field and is used by many celebrities.
• Ad.ly – Another Popular sponsored tweets program.
• MyLikes – It is basically a sponsored likes program, where you can monetize your tweets as well as posts by sharing your likes.

Now, as you’ve got a basic picture about twitter monetization. Let’s talk about the pros and cons of twitter monetization.

Making Money via Twitter is the Way to Go

• It is the easiest way to make money online. Even a blog takes 1-2 months to start earning and requires a lot of hard work. But here, you just need to type the 140 chars and viola! you are minting money.
• Huge Earning Potential -  Sponsored Tweets can fetch you huge amounts of cash in a little span of time. John Chow makes thousand of dollars via sponsored tweets.

Tweeting for Money is Unethical!

• Spamming – As people have a greedy nature. They will be willing to tweet anything for money, even if it’s irrelevant or obscene. This will lead to excessive spamming in twitter stream and it will defeat the whole point of using twitter.
• Shift of Focus – As people will treat twitter as a money making medium, their focus will be only on making money and not on sharing useful content.

People who are for twitter monetization say that twitter monetization will not lead to spamming, if the  twitter users make sure that only the best tweets gets published (even if it is a sponsored one).

I have presented to you both sides of the coin. What is your take on twitter monetization? Is it ethical or is counted as bad twitter manners?

Have you made any money through twitter? Share your experiences here.