On the other hand.. if twitter launched with ads… and then decreased the ads… well.. then I would be happier.

So.. its a matter of perception.

My advice is if you start free, then have ads added, those ads REALLY have to add value to my online experience. If not.. forget it.

I like Young’s suggestions – this way the ads would feel more like genuine testimonials/recommendations – however, the difficulty would be distinguishing those using ads in this way and those just blatantly posting any kind of ad tweet, regardless of their knowledge/lack of knowledge about the product/service in question.

It comes down to whether your followers trust your integrity I suppose. If you want your followers to remain loyal to you and to listen to your opinions and be interested in your views/advice (or whatever it is you are tweeting about in the first place) then IMHO it’s important that if you are going to advertise to them, it needs to be relevant, reviewed and not too frequent.

To quote Michael Wesch, “We need people with human interests and not market interests participating (on Twitter). That means people need to participate in their spare time and not when they’re on the clock for some company.”

Twitter, like all other forms of social media should be a place to communicate with your followers. If Twitter users choose to advertise they must consider the consequences, such as losing their followers. When I first started using MySpace and Facebook I saw it as a place to communicate with friends. In my opinion, as much as I would prefer to leave advertisements out of Twitter, I feel that because compensation is involved many individuals will jump on the opportunity.

-John

Do people really read and process every tweet in their stream? I think most of us have developed our own filters, whether it be scanning through long lists of unread tweets looking for certain people or keywords or whatever else people are doing.

If people I follow start mixing in ads with their tweets, I’ll probably just learn to read over them. If they get REALLY aggressive, I’ll unfollow them. No harm done to me.

There are plenty of people using Twitter to advertise already. Some people (like me) plug their latest blog posts, some (again, like me) promote an event they’re organizing or attending. If someone chooses to unfollow, that’s their decision. I think most people simply read over them if they’re not interested.

1. Related to your niche.

2. You have used the product or service and do think they are useful.

3. You are able to arrange the words.

And, the advertisement won’t be effective if you do not have quite a lot of followers. The good advertisement should be win-win-win.

I think in time stuff like this will become the butt of jokes the way Amway or similar things are. It’s pretty much a universal truth that friends who constantly try to sell friends stuff are annoying and not influential.

That said, I admit if I could make thousands of dollars off sending a tweet, I might feel differently….or at least be willing to swallow my unease and push the button anyway.