When advertising on Twitter, disclosure is not enough.

In my last post, I discussed self-promotion in social media. In this post, we'll begin looking at compensated promotion, with a focus on Twitter.

To be clear, we're talking here about Twitter users promoting someone else's product, service, organization, or the like, in exchange for money or in-kind payment. As with any social media marketing channel, Twitter presents both marketers and publishers (in this case, compensated Twitter users) with a tricky challenge. How do you make your marketing effective and profitable without triggering backlash or losing audiences' attention?

Disclosure has been a hot topic since the FTC updated its guidelines to explicitly discuss compensated promotion in social media. But disclosure is just a basic requirement, not a strategy. While getting caught lying is a good way to tank a campaign, it takes more than basic honesty to make your marketing efforts profitable.

In fact, the key to compensated promotion isn't much different from self-promotion: keep your content relevant and interesting.

It turns out that it's not commercial content per se that people mind. Audiences will happily consume and share commercial content if it's useful or entertaining. What people object to is any content -- commercial or not -- that's irritating, off-topic, or interrupts something more interesting.

Annoy your audience and you'll lose them. Keep your compensated tweets relevant and they'll be tolerated. Find a way to bring value to the conversation, and they may even be welcomed. You might even discover that formal association with a brand can actually increase a publisher's credibility and authority -- and the ability to drive clicks and purchases.

Of course, this kind of micro-targeting requires a different approach from your typical online advertising. Here's where it's important for marketers to stop thinking of micro-publishers as inventory providers and start thinking of them as marketing partners.

Twitter already requires that its users manually approve and post all compensated tweets. Rather than trying to exercise total control over brand messages -- impossible in any social media marketing campaign -- smart marketers are giving publishers responsibility for fine-tuning campaigns to their particular audiences. The result? More audience engagement and higher conversion rates.

If marketers and compensated Twitter users share responsibility for keeping commercial content relevant, interesting, and honest, we can all benefit from Twitter's growth as a marketing platform. And that includes our audiences.

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FTC Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/10/endortest.shtm

Twitter Automation Rules and Best Practices http://help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/76915