Twitter famously posed the question: "What are you doing now?" For an increasing number of its users, the answer is: "Earning big bucks."
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Celebrities, multinationals and anonymous jokesters keep finding new ways to spin tweets into gold. Now investors are rushing to get in on the action in the run-up to the social media giant's highly anticipated initial public offering. In fact, the desire to buy shares of Twitter on the secondary market ahead of the IPO is so strong it's getting the attention of federal regulators. On Tuesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged two money managers it alleged had overcharged and misled investors on funds formed to buy shares of Twitter and other social-media companies.
But without owning a single share of the company, some Twitter users have managed to make small fortunes off the site. And one doesn't have to be Lady Gaga -- who this month reached 20 million followers -- to earn a living 140 characters at a time. Humor accounts, in particular, do a bumper business. "It's possible to have 500,000 followers and make a six-figure income," says Branden Hampton. He founded @notebook or "Notebook of Love" in February 2011, has 2.5 million followers. Hampton, who operates the site with his wife Stephanie Perez, says, "I never spent a dime on marketing." The Twitterati also work together to build a following: @menshumor, which started in August 2011, traded free Tweets with @notebook. Jonathan Standefer, co-founder of @menshumor, says he charges $350 per sponsored tweet or four for $1,000.
Of course, not everyone who achieves fame through Twitter manages the fortune part. Last May, freelance IT consultant Sohaib! Athar n oticed helicopters circling a house in his neighborhood in Abbottabad, Pakistan. He tweeted about it without realizing he was witnessing a defining moment in history: the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Athar -- who this month accepted travel and lodging expenses to give a talk for the Poynter Institute in Austin, Texas -- says he turned down money for exclusive interviews after Bin Laden's death. "I did not earn a single penny from the incident," he says. "I try to keep that separate from my offline life or my real life." Athar also says he has the same half-dozen IT clients he had before May 2, 2011.
Last week, we highlighted the financial pitfalls of making mistakes on the Twitter (5 of the Costliest Tweets Ever). Here are micro-blogging's biggest winners -- the most profitable tweets.
A tweet walks into a bar...
- Payday: Over $1 million
Mocking one's parents is no way to repay years of love and support -- except on Twitter. Justin Halpern started the Twitter feed @s#*!mydadsays on Aug. 3, 2009, with the tweet: "I didn't live to be 73 years old so I could eat kale. Don't fix me your breakfast and pretend you're fixing mine." That and the posts that followed led to a book, which remained No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list for 11 weeks. And the book was then turned into a CBS TV series starring William Shatner. "It completely changed my life," he says. He's earned over $1 million since then, which doesn't include future earnings from books and writing jobs on other TV shows. Twitter isn't full-proof. His sitcom, described as a "s***ty TV show" by Halpern himself, was canceled after 18 episodes. "I don't see my dad as often, maybe once a week," he says, "so I probably only update it once every two or three weeks." For a follow-up, Halpern now has another book, "I Suck at Girls."
Celebrities endorse and re-tweet
- Payday: $100,000
Reality stars fit right in with Twitter's instant-fame ethos. The highest celebrity endorsers can earn up to $20,000 for a single tweet, but some companies have offered $100,000 to sponsor a celebrity's Twitter account, according to Jennifer P. Brown, of social media agent SponsoredTweets. Brown recently received one such offer, but declined as she says the brand in question wasn't a right fit for the celebrity. She wouldn't name the brand or celebrity. Reality star Khloe Kardashian's tweets to her 6.4 million followers are worth $9,100 each, Brown says. In fact, more people follow Kardashian than watch her show. The last season of "Keeping up with the Kardashians" fell to 3 million per episode from 3.5 million, according to Nielsen data, but Khloe Kardashian and her sister Kim collectively have over four times as many followers.
TwitChange raises money for Haiti
- Payday: $540,000
While many celebrities are known to endorse products to their millions of followers by tweeting about how much they like them, others have turned this million-dollar marketing opportunity into an act of charity. In 2010, TwitChange -- a for-profit social marketing company not affiliated with Twitter -- held a charity auction for a nonprofit group to build an orphanage in Haiti. The auction leveraged the fact th! at peopl e were willing to bid to be followed on Twitter and have their thoughts (and brand) re-Tweeted by the likes of celebrities such as Eva Longoria, Demi Moore, Ryan Seacrest, Demi Lovato, Zachary Levi and Justin Bieber. Levi, an actor, was given the single largest donation of $20,825, according to Mikey Ames, strategy adviser at TwitChange. After 13,000 bids through eBay's auction service Kompolt, the site raised $540,000 from its gaggle of celebrities and won the 2010 Mashable Award for the Most Creative Social Good Campaign.
Lady Gaga tweets this way
- Payday: $30 million-plus
There's a reason Lady Gaga became the person with the most Twitter followers -- 20.7 million and counting -- aside from her talent. "She really engages them and re-tweets stuff they say as if she was one of them," says John Bonini, content marketing manager of Impact Branding & Design. Gaga has made a career in being an outsider, which many of her fans relate to, he says. She has more followers than Justin Bieber's 18.4 million, Shakira's 14.8 million and Katy Perry's 16 million. Bonini says the publicity and direct access Twitter gives Gaga to her fans is worth around one-third of the $90 million that Forbes says she earned during the last financial year. Twitter creates a bond and loyalty with her fans who otherwise may be tempted to download her music illegally. Of course, it doesn't hurt that tweets from @ladygaga automatically appear on her Facebook page, which has over 49 million "likes."
The world's first tweet
- Payday: $650 million
The very first messages posted on Twitter limped onto the Internet at 5:02pm on March 21, 2006. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey (@jack) tweeted: "inviting coworkers." It didn't make a big splash at the time, nor did Dorsey use up his 140-character limit for a service that has helped people around the world organize mass demonstrations and topple governments. But it was somewhat less demanding and, perhaps, exciting than the first words of Alexander Graham Bell on his then-little known invention, the telephone: "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you." Dorsey's opening gambit did, however, launch a social networking monolith that has attracted 300 million followers and, according to Forbes Magazine, earned him more than Bell. In six short years, Dorsey gained a net worth of $650 million, which works out at $38 million per character for his first effort. "It's the first and, thus far, probably the most profitable tweet," Ames says. "But it's great that he created a platform where other people can make money too."
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