Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have totally transformed the way people interact with family and friends, shop for goods, and do just about anything on a daily basis. Marketing and advertising firms still have some catching up to do.
Pay with a Tweet, recognizing the ridiculously untapped social marketing power of Twitter, offers musicians, publishers, independent authors, and others an easy way to give away their product in exchange for virality. In other words, if a user tweets about (or likes via Facebook) the client’s album or work, the user receives the work at no cost.
In today’s world the value of people talking about your product is sometimes higher than the money you would get for it. ‘Pay with a Tweet’ is the first social payment system, where people pay with the value of their social network.
It’s simple, every time somebody pays with a tweet, he or she tells all their friends about the product. Boom.
The “social payment software” is the brainchild of Leif Abraham and Christian Behrendt, who operate Innovative Thunder, a New York City-based team working on creative marketing in the digital world.
When Pay with a Tweet launched in mid-June of this year, its creators also released a book called Oh My God What Happened and What Should I Do? to both paint a picture of marketing in the digital world and to demonstrate the power of their simple software. After two months, 240,000 people had visited the book website and, of those, 113,000 people had downloaded the book.
In a conversation with co-creator Leif Abraham, we learned that (overall) clients have created over 5,000 Pay with a Tweet buttons and more than 300,000 users have clicked those buttons to receive content for free.
Though musicians and publishers can’t make any money through the Pay with a Tweet system, Abraham says he encourages clients to offer customers the opportunity to pay with “regular money.”
Abraham and Behrendt’s book, for example, is available through a couple retailers, including Amazon.
One might wonder who would possibly pay actual money for a product, be it music or a book, if they could just tweet for nothing and get the same product. Well, fair or not, artists have already been struggling with that question for a few years now, ever since p2p sharing sites started making it incredibly easy to download albums or books quickly and for free. While this new tool doesn’t exactly solve the problem of how to make money on the Internet, it definitely provides a fluid way of getting your name out there.
As for how Pay with a Tweet will make money, Abraham’s not concerned about that at the moment.
“Right now we are focusing on taking the service onto the next stage. We think when you have the best product, money will come automatically, even if not directly. But the service will stay free forever.”
