Rapper 50 Cent makes $8.7 million in one day by using Twitter

Rapper 50 Cent made $8.7 million in one day by tweeting information over the last weekend about a company in which he is holding shares. A company called H&H Imports with which 50 Cent formed a partnership will soon introduce a wireless headphones being part of 50 Cent design line. In response to 50 Cent’s tweeting, his 3.8 million followers rushed on Monday to buy the company’s shares inflating the stock’s price by 240% , the company’s market capitalization to $50 million and the value of 50 Cent’s shares to $8.7 million.

That history pretty much illustrates the power of social media and a special kind of relationship that the account holders develop with their followers. In my opinion, the whole story proved an inevitable trend emerging that will soon undermine and challenge business models of technology giants like Google or Microsoft and also social media companies like Twitter and Facebook. The form of advertising offered by all of those companies is impersonal and less productive than other possible forms, which could be offered by individual account holders.

In 2009, the Nielsen Company came out with a research suggesting that the consumers trust the least in advertisement displayed to them in the form of textads on mobile phones, online banner and video ads, and search engine results ads. While the biggest trust the consumers have in recommendations from people they know, brand websites, editorial content, brand sponsorship, newspapers and magazines.

The 50 Cent story is a great example confirming the results of Nielsen’s research. Because how much time and money a company would need to spend on dry and impersonal ads in Google’s AdWords, Yahoo’s AdChoices or Facebook Ads to encourage consumers to invest in its shares so that the market cap of that company increases in one day by 240%? We can imagine that it would have to be an insanely large sum of money and the response to such ads would be very weak and discouraging. But with the 50 Cent example, the advertisers may now start rethinking their social media strategies and adopt such novel approaches to increase sales and return on investment.

@SebastianAulich

Related Posts:

• Cool Twitter-based business models: Ad.ly
• Research: Pinterest delivers more revenue per click than Facebook and Twitter
• Facebook once again copycats Twitter, will introduce verified accounts for high-profile members
• Salman Rushdie attacks Facebook via Twitter
• Scared #Facebook is copying Google+ and #Twitter