As Twitter continues its meteoric rise towards becoming the largest, easiest vehicle for mass personal communication, advertisers and marketers continue to experiment with how the social media tool can be monetized and/or integrated into their campaigns.

Three concerns in particular have driven these experiments: Cost, Impact, and Disclosure.

Cost

As anyone with a Twitter account can tell you, Twitter is a free service.  It costs you nothing to set up an account, and there is no charge for posting to Twitter.

However, there is another price associated with marketing through Twitter, and its coin is time.

If you wish to grow a successful Twitter presence you need to build up a following.  Doing so takes time, not to mention luck, wit, charm, and an impeccable sense of what’s valuable to your desired audience.

Time to research what’s useful, fun, and interesting.  Time to review friends’ tweets to see if any are worth passing along or commenting upon.  Time to respond if anyone sends you a directed question.  Time to prove that you’re not just a flash in the pan.  Time building up a name for yourself before you ever even pitch your first product.  And even with all that time, there is no guarantee that your following will grow as much as you’d like it to.

In other words, without a strategy or other purpose, time spent building up a Twitter presence is time working on spec.

That’s why marketers have been urging their clients to contact established Tweeters when breaking into the medium.

Impact

Every time someone posts an advertisement, they run the risk of losing followers.  That’s why you need to think about how to make twitter ads carry the most punch.

It’s not enough to have a large audience; you need a large audience that actually cares about what you’re offering.  A Twitter account that’s been dedicated to discussing Soap Operas is not the place to offer a promotional code for live fish bait.

If you need proof - just take a look at your own followers’ page.  If I were a betting man I’d lay odds that you have at least one follower who has one post, less than a dozen followers, and is following more than 5,000 Twitter accounts.

Who is this silent voyeur?  It’s an advertiser - one who has decided to invest neither time nor (I hope) money into their campaign.  If I had not drawn your attention to it, would you have bothered reading their post?  Would you have bought what they are offering? Would you have followed them?

I wouldn’t.

Disclosure

One solution that many companies found to the question cost and impact on Twitter was to offer rewards and products to well-known Tweeters who recommended their products.  Earlier this year the FTC decided that such activity was deceptive unless clearly disclosed.

While this has not ended the practice of sponsored tweeting, it has added another wrinkle.  With only 140 characters available, any space spent declaring a paid relationship is space that is not spent on message.

Solutions with Cost, Impact, and Disclosure in Mind

There are already two companies offering packaged solutions to all three issues raised in this article.

• Izea’s Sponsored Tweets uses an advertiser driven bidding system that appears to be modeled on the AdWords interface.
• Ad.ly, uses a Tweeter-driven bidding system that allows each twitter user to state their price per post.

Both leave final discretion on whether to accept an offer to the person who will be making the post.

Next month San Francisco startup likes.com will join them with an authentic recommendation system of its own in which will connect Tweeters with advertisers whose products or services they have already recommended.