For many people the meaning of the term “social media” is limited to the social networking and social bookmarking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Reddit, Delicious, Stumbleupon, etc.

In reality social media is any form of media that allows interactive two-way communication.

Forums are social media. Different community sites are social media. Even your favorite reality shows become social media when they provide hot lines for real-time voting. Voting mechanism is the way for fans to provide live feedback. Without it any show is a form of a one-way communication. However, when voting crosses the borders of the local auditory and is spread nation-wide, then a show all over sudden transforms from usual media event to a social media phenomenon.

Blogs also can be social media. Notice the “can”. Not all blogs can be considered social media. They have to provide the means for two-way communications to be included in the loop. Blog analog of the reality show voting mechanism is social sharing. It could (and should) be encouraged through a whole array of social sharing buttons.

Yet the main way to establish a two way communications with blog readers is blog comments. A few years ago they were mostly considered an after-thought of blog management. Now they are treated by search engines as strong social signals important for search rankings.

What’s more important, blog comments could increase your social reach. If you use one of the plugins that allows users to comment from their Facebook profile, Twitter account or other social networking site, you gain multiple benefits. First, you make it easy for people to comment – that means more comments, more content, and higher interactivity. Second, when people comment through social networks, other people see these comments and may want to share their opinions as well.

Good social comments plugins to consider are IntenseDebate Comments, Disqus Comment System, Livefyre Realtime Comments and Facebook Comments for WordPress. There are plenty of others, but that should be enough to get you started.

You also can receive more comments by featuring the most useful comments and sharing them with your audience. If blog comments are properly encouraged and cultivated they can help you to build a thriving blog community.
However, if you won’t make it easy for people to comment, you will only have a few comments. And all the blog commenting power will be wasted.

CAPTCHAS in Blog Comments

That’s why we decided to remove CAPTCHAs from the blog comments. There is a place and time for everything, and we think that CAPTCHAs time has passed.
Why do you need CAPTCHAs on your web sites and blogs? There are millions of spam submitters on the Net, provided both as software and web services. So you need to create a virtual wall that won’t prevent people from interacting with you yet would serve as a barrier against automatic blog comments and form submissions.

A few years ago even the utilization of blog comment filtering plugins such as Akismet didn’t guarantee that some automatic blog comments won’t fall through the crack, so to speak. So CAPTCHAs were a second line of anti-spam defense.

The comment filtering algorithms have seen significant improvements, so there is no need to worry too much that your blog will be flooded by automatic spam. You won’t see it anyway. Just set up your anti-spam plugin to automatically delete all the spam comments after certain period of time.

Plus, you can enforce the option to manually check all the blog comments before they are published. So if there is even remote possibility that useless spam comment somehow finds its way into the comments’ approval queue, it will be the end of the line. It’ll never see the light of day.

CAPTCHA is still useful for contact forms. Generally people who want to contact a person or organization are more persistent than those who just want to share their opinion on the article or particular topic of interest.

However, if used for blog commenting, it hinders the level of participation, prevents the building of a thriving blog community and significantly decreases the possibility of social sharing. In other words, it does more harm than good. So it’s time for CAPTCHAs to go.

We just installed IntenseDebate. When you install it, you have an option to use it on all posts including older ones or for new posts only. If you choose a second option, you will have to continue using the wordpress commenting system for old posts.

If you enable IntenseDebate system for all posts, the trade off is that previously made comments won’t be displayed any longer. Though this is not an ideal situation, it’s worth it in our case – we sacrificed old comments in order to fully utilize the social power of new database. So now our visitors are able to comment on all posts right from their Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Please share your thoughts and ideas. Start commenting. Do you see the “Top 7 Commenters” on the side bar? There are no comments yet. Since old comments won’t be displayed, it’s your chance to get featured as a top commenter – just go through our blog posts, find the ones you like or want to add something to, and write a valuable comment.

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TwitterDMTwitter direct message system is a very useful utility and a source of unique and valuable content.

Unfortunately many twitter users don’t know how to properly use it and spread the rumors that twitter DMs (short for twitter direct messages) are a waste of time.

Others don’t bother to research twitter DMs themselves before announcing their “verdict”. They just heard some “social media guru” saying twitter DMs don’t work for marketing and that was enough for them to utter “their opinion”.

Samuel Goldwyn once said the infamous phrase: “When I want your opinion, I’ll give it to you”. For people who blindly repeat the opinions of self-pronounced gurus without double-checking the facts, it seems to be very appropriate.

The Truth about Twitter DMs

We use Twitter DMs as a valuable component of social media marketing campaigns for all our clients. The information in this article is based on real digital marketing experience and not some cooked up opinionated theory.

Here is the truth about twitter DMs.

If managed the right way, twitter DMs could help:

  • to identify twitter accounts worthy of further research,
  • to build initial relationship with select users
  • to generate quality leads
  • to gather rare intelligence about other companies
  • to find interesting insights on your topics of interest

If you handle them incorrectly, twitter DMs are not only an enormous waste of time but also a potential threat to the reputation of your brand.

10 Do’s and Don’ts of Twitter DMs

Here a 10 important Do’s and Don’ts to keep in mind when using Twitter DMs

1) Don’t send more than 2 welcome DMs
2) Don’t send boring auto-DMs
3) Don’t send auto-DMs without call to action
4) Don’t send auto-DMs from validation service
5) Don’t click on links from DMs with suspicious messages

6) Do: Use the right DM tools or DM software to manage your DMs
7) Do: Regularly Check your DMs
8) Do: Filter your DMs
9) Do: Use DMs for private interactions
10) Do: Purge old DMs

Let’s take a closer look at each paragraph.
Don’t send more than 2 welcome DMs.” There are many unwritten rules on Twitter. One of them is that it’s acceptable to send 1 or 2 welcome direct messages to new followers. But if you send more than 2 welcome DMs, you’ll cross invisible line and go into the land of unwelcome spammers. Don’t do it. It’s not only useless and unprofessional, there is a good chance that you would be either unfollowed or banned.

Don’t send boring auto-DMs“. How many times have you seen a DM that says something like this: “Hey, thank you for following. Like my Facebook page: link. Visit my website: link”.

You have to remember that all people are tuned to “WIFM” wave and if you’re in dissonance with “What’s In It For Me”, you won’t get too far. Time is precious. Why on Earth would people like your page if you don’t offer anything in return? The same goes for a website visit. Offer them ethical bribe – like free download, discount or special offer or, if you’re an expert, share insights or professional secrets . Offer real value, not some regurgitated BS. Make them feel special and proud to be a part of your social community.

Don’t send auto-DMs without call to action“. This one is self-explanatory. Let’s say you receive a DM with the following subject: “Thanks 4 following. I’m a best-selling author and I love to connect with thought leaders. Talk soon”. You take a notice of this DM, may be put it in a folder of people to follow up with, but since there is no call to action, you go on reading other DMs. If this person would provide a link in the DM with a compelling offer, there is a great chance his site would get a lot of visitors.

Don’t send auto-DMs from validation service“. While other do’s and don’ts are highly recommended, this one is a matter of opinion. If you have a lot of followers, you will be followed not only by interesting people and companies, but by spam accounts as well. The right way to deal with this situation is set up filters in your DM management software, and let it handle it.

The wrong way (in my opinion) is to use a Twitter validation service like TrueTwit that will send verification DMs on your behalf. Why? If I receive a DM that says something like this: “this acct uses TrueTwit validation service. Click this link to confirm that you’re a real person”, I go on reading other DMs.

This direct message will be simply deleted as part of the routine DM purging procedure (more on this later). Since I don’t want to waste time with CAPTCHAs nor have any inclination to prove that I’m a real person, I NEVER CLICK ON THE  TWITTER VERIFICATION LINK.

If this person decides to follow me on its own later on, that’s fine. I might follow back. I don’t use twitter validation service, so this person won’t have to jump through hoops to follow me.

Don’t click on a links from DMs with suspicious messages“. If you’ve used Twitter for a while, you most likely received DMs that said something like this: “Did you see this picture of you? LOL” or “This Twitter user says really bad things about you” or “What are you doing in this video? LOL”.

Don’t click on these links! There is a high probability that they will lead you to phishing sites that will install malware on your computer and will use it to steal your financial information. They can also compromise your twitter account (more on this in the paragraph about brand reputation).

Do: Use the right DM tools or DM software to manage your DMs“. Unfortunately twitter provides a very poor user interface to manage twitter DMs. I have to say that as far as DMs are concerned earlier twitter version had much better usability.

You can’t delete multiple DMs after you read them, you have to do it manually one-by-one, only a few recent DMs are displayed, and the rest is often unavailable, both incoming and outgoing DMs are jammed in the same popup. Basically, it’s very difficult to manage Twitter DMs from Twitter. To be efficient, you have to use third party services.

Professional version of SocialOomph (developed by Dewald Pretorius) allows you to easily manage the direct messages of all your Twitter accounts from one console. You can quickly set up auto-DMs to welcome your followers.

Auto Twitter DMs are an excellent source of fresh and targeted leads, don’t underestimate this opportunity. The program also deals with SPAM – you can set up your filters, and it will make sure you never see the DMs from these accounts again.

Do: Regularly Check your DMs“. You have to check your DMs regularly. Otherwise you could not only miss and important potential client or partner, the reputation of your brand could be at risk.

Let me explain. There are millions of people who unwittingly click on links in phishing DMs (as was explained earlier). Not only they become victims of identity theft, their twitter accounts begin sending pornographic/viagra DMs or DMs with links to phishing sites.

If DMs are not checked regularly, it may take a long time before twitter user identifies and rectifies the situation. In the meantime people who follow this twitter user might think that those nasty DMs are sent by him/her. The best case scenario – this user will be unfollowed, the worst case scenario people will be so upset about this inappropriate DMs that they will tweet/ blog about it which could lead to serious reputation management issues.

Do: Filter your DMs“. Once again, you need twitter DM management software for this. See a DM with suspicious message? Filter this user, so you never see DMs from him again. See a DM from a superstar? Respond with personal DM and start building a relationship.

Do: Use DMs for private interactions“. Never tweet your email or other personal information in a public tweet. Instead, use DMs for this purpose. Also use a DM if you want to offer a certain person a super-deal not available to general public.

Do: Purge old DMs“. Old DMs tend to grow in your DM folder. Sift through them regularly, find the diamonds in a rough, filter spam, and delete the rest. It doesn’t have to be a painful one-by-one deletion process. Just use Twitter DM purge services.

That’s it for today. Please leave comments about your experience with Twitter DMs, which features would you like to learn more about, etc.

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What Social Media Lessons Can We Learn from Oscar Academy Awards in 2013?

Image via Flickr

The golden dust has settled and now it’s time to review social media imprint left by the biggest Hollywood event of the year. Super Bowl, Grammy and Oscars are not just huge events with a possibility of a long term historical impact, they provide invaluable opportunity for your company and brand to get free publicity and enormous social media exposure if you manage to successfully ride the wave of a world-wide awareness.

Here are some of the questions that will be answered in this post:

  • What social marketing lessons can we learn from Oscars?
  • Which social media-savvy companies successfully piggybacked on this world class event?
  • Which companies failed in their branding attempt?
  • Super Bowl versus Oscars – who won a social media race?
  • How your company or brand can get the most social media coverage out of Oscar or similar event?
  • What is a history of Oscar Awards?

In terms of the size of the audience Oscars is in the same league as Super Bowl.

However, it triggered less social signals on various social networks than its sport opponent.

May be audience was turned away by untasteful jokes from Oscars’ host Seth MacFarlane called by The New Civil Rights Movement “poor performance laced with anti-gay, anti-women, racist, and otherwise juvenile jokes“.

May be the unscheduled blackout during the Super Bowl turned the scales in its favor since people couldn’t actually watch the event and were left with an option to tweet about it or share it otherwise.

May be it was something else. Whatever the reason, “the Super Bowl for women” (as Oscars is called sometimes), was left far behind by its “masculine” counterpart.

Erik Sass compares the total number of tweets produced during both televised events and share some other interesting stats:

Oscars Not as Social as Super Bowl

Trendrr: the social media measurement platform tallied 13.2 million social interactions of various kinds for the Oscars, compared to 47.7 million interactions for this year’s Super Bowl…

The company that succeeded in social branding during the Super Bowl was Oreo. Jessica Gioglio describes how Oreo did it. It made dozens other companies try to implement real time marketing and branding strategies during Oscars. Many have tried but not many succeeded. Even Oreo failed a bit short this time.

Paula Keller shares how JCPenney amplified its TV commercial through strong real time multi-channel social media interactions:

Surprise Oscar Winner: jcpenney’s #YoursTruly Real-Time

During this evening’s 85th Academy Awards, jcpenney used real-time marketing to capitalize on our here and now, instant gratification tendencies by launching a strong activation through social media...

We saw how to ride the Oscars wave the right way. Jay Bayer shows 17 tweets from companies (including Oreo) that were not very successful in their branding attempts:

17 (mostly failed) Brand Tweets From The Oscars

In the few short weeks between the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards, it seems dozens of brands (and/or their agencies) have decided to “get themselves some of that real-time marketing!”…

Ok, so you you see how to do the real time marketing the right and wrong way. Now you’re probably wondering how to apply this newly acquired knowledge to your brand.

Gerry Moran gives valuable advices on how to use the power of twitter to increase your brand visibility during the show. Oscar 2013 is a history, but you can use the same steps to get the most bang out of future meg-events.

5 Ways To Get The Most From The Oscars With Social Media

5 Ways To Get The Most From The Oscars With Social Media. Here is how you can use social media to enjoy the Oscars tonight on your second screen…

That’s enough food for thought for now. Let’s just take at the history of Oscars and ponder on how the humble beginning lead to the phenomenown known all over the world…

Academy Award History

Each year, millions tune in to watch the Academy Awards. Over the decades, thousands of Oscar statuettes have been handed out to those who work in the film in..

As always, we would love to hear your comments and thoughts.

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say-no-to-facebook-likes-smToday social media is crucial for the success of any business since ROI (return on investment) of social media campaigns is much higher than the ROI of virtually any other marketing channel. SEO is less reliable now due to frequent search algorithm changes, so social media marketing becomes the main channel of predictable organic traffic. Of course social media campaigns are not limited to organic traffic, yet paid traffic in social media rarely stands on its own, and usually serves as an accelerator for organic growth.

Whether you’re a small business owner or the head of a marketing department for a large company, you have to figure out how social media marketing fits in your overall marketing strategy. And since Facebook is the major player in social marketing field it’s important to understand what part of your marketing budget should be allocated to Facebook marketing.

What stock trading has in common with business analysis

When stock traders decide what action to take against a particular stock (buy, sell or hold) they carefully analyze the past performance of that stock. Sure, they also examine other parameters pertaining to fundamental and technical analysis, yet the historical performance plays a very significant role in a final decision.

We can use the same method for our business analysis. To understand whether an average business should increase or decrease its involvement with Facebook marketing, let’s review the history of Facebook policies related to business users. Such overview should help us to determine whether this social network is reliable and suitable for long term business strategy. The answer, in turn, will allow us to fathom the amount of resources that should be designated to the development of future Facebook marketing campaigns.

After all, it doesn’t make sense to invest considerable resources in business presence on Facebook (such as the development and ongoing maintenance of Facebook fan pages with all the bells and whistles) and its promotion if the company can’t be sure that this investment will bring sufficient long term benefits, right?

Facebook Plays a Selfish Game

Facebook is notorious for a long history of privacy violations and self-indulgent business decisions which vividly demonstrate that this social network only cares about its own agenda. However, due to the lack of education among average users about potential security consequences of such actions, it still remains one of the most popular choices for social interactions.

Until recently this social network was also a very popular marketing venue for many businesses. The sheer size of this network (in October 2012 Facebook reached 1 Billion users) made it a coveted source of targeted leads. Even after the subtraction of 8.7% of bogus accounts (the fact admitted by Facebook), it still provides a potential reach of over 900 Million users.

Of course it would be unreasonable to think that such reach is really possible on Facebook for any product or service. The real size for any market could be estimated only after demographic and Geo filters are applied. Still it could’ve been a very impressive potential reach. However, huge quantity of potential eyeballs only matters to business if they could be converted into leads.

Due to Facebook’s latest changes the conversion for organic social media campaigns is seriously decreased. At the end of August/ beginning of September 2012 Facebook modified its EdgeRank algorithm reducing the real percentage of fans that could be reached through communications via fan page. As a result, fan pages found their reach dropped by up to 40%. Stats indicate that posts never reached 100% of a fan base during last year, but this was still a humongous drop.

Facebook denies that median reach is decreased stating that “analytics providers are only looking at a relatively smaller number of pages, typically less than 1000″. The reality is, nobody cares too much if the median reach remains the same or not. What companies care about is whether their own reach decreased. And it sure did. Soon after slicing the organic reach Facebook readily offered a solution on how page owners can reach the 100% of a fan base. They simply have to pay up.

How Facebook Creates New Revenue Streams

After the stock price went down more than 50% in September 2012, Facebook urgently launched new revenue-generating programs in September and October) – Offers, FBX (Facebook AdExchange), Gifts, Promoted Posts, and Mobile App ads. The program that so thoughtfully addressed an issue of decreased reach was Promoted Posts. From now on, companies could reach the 100% of a fan base – for a fee. Incidentally this paid program was launched right after organic reach was slashed in half…

Of course, Facebook vehemently denies that the decrease in reach and a consequent launch of Promoted Posts is a blatant attempt to force companies to pay for the full reach. They say that it’s a necessary adjustment to de-clutter users’ newsfeed caused by the fast growth of number of pages liked by users. If so, why not let users decide the updates from which pages they want to see? Users can always click a “hide” button and hide the feeds from the pages that they don’t want to hear from often. Of course, there is no money in this process for Facebook…

How Facebook Tries to Fix the Shortcomings of the EdgeRank

After receiving a harsh critique from social media about these “innovations”, Facebook implemented a few changes that supposedly would help brands to get higher visibility. First, it created a dedicated feed for brands/ fan pages, and provided new tab “Pages Feed” in the left sidebar of user’ home page profile for this feed. However, the majority of users only use newsfeed, they would barely notice a link to pages feed which is buried among dozens other links…

Then Facebook introduced an opt-in feature that allows users to receive notifications whenever the Pages they follow post something new on their Timelines. It’s cumbersome and doesn’t really address the issue of decreased reach. Users actually have to go to your page, right click on a “like” button and from the drop down list choose “get notifications”. Theoretically, if a user liked a page this setting should be “On” by default. It’s not.

Facebook also now has “Interests” feature. If a user creates interests lists and add pages to them, s/he will be able to see the updates from those pages after clicking on an “Interests” link from the profile page. But again it’s hardly an equivalent to newsfeed exposure.

Why Popularity of Facebook Pages Is Bound to Decrease

If a business has hundreds of thousands of fans, chances are that the majority of them are now lost for organic reach. Sure, the insignificant number of fans will use “Notifications”, “Interests” and “Pages Feed” features and continue to receive page updates, but the majority of fans won’t jump through so many hoops. Business can educate new fans on how to make sure they see all page posts, but all the effort and resources spent on acquiring earlier fans were in vain.

One of the main reasons of Facebook popularity among business users was the ability to combine free and paid traffic methods to achieve better ROI. The key element of successful marketing campaign on Facebook was the development of effective fan pages. Brands then could grow their fan base both organically (by engaging with their fans, providing interesting content, creating contests, coupons, etc) and by creating ads campaigns.

Many companies were running Facebook ads to promote their own fan pages. It was also not uncommon to see a TV commercial where businesses provided Facebook URL for their fan page instead of the URL to their own sites. Businesses were willing to spend considerable resources on acquiring fans. The thought process was that they acquire fans once and then would be able to talk with them for a long time. Fan page in this strategy should’ve served as a tool for frequent communications and increased engagement with prospective customers. This logic worked for a while. It’s obvious that with the latest Facebook changes it won’t work anymore.

Now businesses have to shell out a pretty penny in order to reach the 100% of the fan base. Mind you, that they already invested considerable resources in acquiring this fan base, so this looks a lot like a double taxation.

It’s an unpleasant turn of events, for sure, but hardly surprising. Companies should’ve known better. After all, it’s not the first time that Facebook deceives its business users. Let’s take a little excursus in the history of Facebook malevolent decisions.

When Facebook introduced the concept of fan pages, it did an extremely lousy job explaining the rules on how to name pages. It was clear that Facebook was fighting name squatting and the brand names were reserved for major brands, but it was unclear that businesses are not allowed to choose general names for their pages. As a result, many businesses chose keyword-related general names for their fan pages (something like “Horse Riding”). Instead of giving a business-specific name (for example, “Horse Riding Advice from Emily Watkins”)

Facebook’s reaction? It didn’t notify the page owners that something was wrong. Facebook simply waited until pages fan base grows to 10,000, and then took these pages away from the business owners by turning them into community pages. Yet again page owners invested time and money in building pages, and on a whim all was lost. Do you begin to see a pattern here?

Here is another example. Facebook made developers use its own markup language to build fan pages (FBML). After Facebook decided to switch to apps, and all the pages built with FBML became obsolete. Code standardization is a good move, but it doesn’t change the fact that all the effort that page owners put in their pages turned out to be useless.

Bottom line: Facebook marketing is still important for market research and is useful in its paid portion (especially mobile advertising), but companies should seriously reconsider the reliability and importance of fan pages.
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Related Articles:
Facebook is Driving away Brands
Facebook: 8.7 percent are fake users
The End of the Facebook Like Bubble
How Facebook Can Steal Your Pages

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Is IZEA Going into Bankruptcy?

September 1, 2012

Don’t Shoot your Golden Goose!

Sponsored Tweets and Social Spark

Social media marketing platform IZEA has launched several promising services during past few years. Among the most popular ones were Sponsored Tweets and Social Spark. Sponsored Tweets served as a broker between twitter advertisers and publishers. Publishers could post sponsored tweets directly into the twitter feeds of targeted publishers whose twitter accounts were related to the products or services advertised. Publishers were getting agreed upon commission, advertisers had exposure to targeted market segments, Sponsored Tweets received brokerage commission. It was a win-win-win for all parties involved.

With Social Spark the business model was pretty much the same. The difference lied in the source of publishers. Instead of twitter publishers this platform connected advertisers with blog publishers who were willing to create sponsored blog posts.

Have you noticed that previous two paragraphs are written in the past tense?

It is done intentionally to emphasize that those services soon will be history. For now both services are still available, yet they probably will be closed pretty soon.

Why do I make such prediction? IZEA seams to forget that its business model heavily relies on the good will of its publishers. And by publishers I mean not only celebrities with millions of twitter followers but also small guys with a few hundreds of followers.

IZEA’s Exuberant Fees

Unfortunately IZEA treats their publishers worse than a piece of dirt. It had rather high minimum withdrawal requirement from the very beginning ($50). Considering that the majority of small users charge only cents per tweet it probably would take them forever to reach this amount so they can actually withdraw. For comparison, MyLikes (another twitter feed brokerage) allows to withdraw when your balance reaches just $2!

After receiving tons of complaints IZEA decided to do a “favor” to its publishers and introduced an early withdrawal option. From that point on publishers could withdraw any amount they wanted. The catch? You have to pay $2 “processing fee” for each early withdrawal.

Some publishers have dozens of twitter accounts. IZEA was asked many times to develop the module for multiple accounts management. The benefits for publishers are obvious –combining the earning from different accounts would easily allow them to reach the threshold and withdraw the earnings without processing fee. Or at least, even if threshold is not reached, pay once to withdraw the combined earnings.

IZEA response – “It’s not going to happen”(not verbatim, this is the quintessence of their answer.) Explanation: high development costs to develop such module.

Withdrawal is done automatically through Paypal so the withdrawal fee is not justified by the “processing expenses” to begin with. The development costs to provide combined account management realistically wouldn’t be that high. But why bother if this fee proved to be an excellent additional income stream? Right, IZEA? Never mind that publishers are not happy with this “innovation”, to say the least.

The Apotheosis of IZEA’s Greed

But it seems that this change was not sufficient enough to satisfy IZEA’s greed. A few months ago they introduced an inactivity fee. Simply put, if you don’t login to each Sponsored Tweets account each month they will deduct the fee of $5 for “inactivity”. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t login to the account simply because there were no offers for that account this month and the requirement to “check in” just for the sake of it is a complete waste of your time . The fee will still be deducted from your balance without any consent on your part.

The Culmination of Publishers Mistreatment by IZEA

And now we reached the apogee of this story. When advertiser is charged per tweet, IZEA automatically takes its commission (which is equal to the price per tweet set up by the twitter user), and the user’s commission is added to the balance. If publisher withdraws before its balance reaches $50, he’s charged with $2 per each withdrawal.

At least publishers could withdraw their money anytime they wanted. Until now that is. Starting August 28 neither users of Sponsored Tweets nor users of Social Spark can withdraw their earnings at all.

The official response from IZEA? -”Technical Difficulties”.
Let me remind you that these are earnings that IZEA had to keep in the account because they belong to publishers.

And the “technical difficulty” may very well be the fact that there is no money in the account.

IZEA Shoots Its Golden Goose

And here is the hilarious part. Money couldn’t be withdrawn due to “technical difficulties”. At the same time the inactivity fee is promptly deducted for the next month.

If the publisher logged in several times trying to withdraw the money, how he could be inactive? Can you clarify this, IZEA? Is there a limit to your greed?

I wouldn’t be surprised if based on all those facts some smart attorney would start a group lawsuit.

To summarize: publishers is a source of your golden eggs, they are your golden goose, IZEA. If you continue treating publishers this way you’ll soon lose them all.

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Image attribution: Image by By Sophie Riches (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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