Do sponsored messages ever work online?

With Visibility (the ability to reach thousands of people in an instant) being the dream goal of retailers online, sponsored messages are one way of achieving that, but do they actually work and if not is there a PR risk?

Adverts such as “I will share your messages twice over 150,000 Twitter followers and 10,000 Facebook friends to help boost your traffic views for $5” are found on Fiverr.com

You would assume that if a seller gets 100 positive reviews and 100 people (like) the service, this would be evidence that sponsored messages work but would that is not necessarily the case.

An in-depth investigation in to the feedback reveals that:

·         Most of the feedback comes from four accounts.

·         Those accounts have no avatar image or bio.

·         The feedback is usually a single word like “Thanks!”

The negative reviews are damning so when taking it all into consideration one can see that this particular “paid tweets” service is poor, and that is just one example from Fivver.

So what is the risk?

The problem is that it is really easy to amass a large Twitter following very quickly through spammy tactics to an account with 40,000 followers could be totally useless. Those followers won’t trust or pay attention to anything that is said, meaning the likelihood of any sales leads being very low.

If you compare this to a natural account that has grown slowly it would be a far better option even if this account only had 1,000 followers.

One more item that needs to be taken into consideration, is that for a message to be legal when promoting a product it must be labeled as sponsored (such as by writing 3spon). Something that the Office of Fair Trading has begun to crackdown on and ensure this rule is being followed.

So do they actually work?

There is a risk that if you don’t get sponsored messages correct you also face investigations from legal bodies. An example of this is The Katie Price snickers campaign which had several tweets with only the last one being labeled as sponsored.

Sponsored messages can work, but they do carry a lot of risk. For all the fallout from the Snickers campaign it did in fact get a lot of people talking about the brand. Great PR stunt, if you don’t take it too seriously.

So it is hard to really say whether or not they are worth it unless you can make something viral like Snickers did. Most campaigns will only ever stick with the original celebrity, getting one hit and that is it.

Is there a better way?

The Apple Approach:

Apple is extreme when it comes to customer love. People post genuine messages of affection for the brand’s products and they do it for free because they actually love Apple.

No trickery is needed and these honest messages will get more people involved in the brand.

What else could you do?

You can send out products and get them reviewed by users.

Gucci has 6.3m Facebook fans and it’s the quality of the product that gets people talking.

Also companies equally learn from bad experiences where they see a bad tweet, fix the problem and then reap in the  benefits from the users who praise the company for fixing it.