UK newspaper The Sun is getting plenty of online coverage for a viral video it has created to capitalise on the interest in Apple’s rumoured tablet computer. But what noone has mentioned is that the seeding started with paid Twitter advertising from Be A Magpie (referral link)…

And I know that because I’ve been running paid Twitter advertising for a while as a test, and spotted it in my approval queue early yesterday, which then got picked up first by Paid Content UK.

The Sun's paid Twitter advert in my stream

Searching Twitter for the bit.ly link shows that 4 other people are using Magpie and beat me to place the advert, as they all used the same text, same ‘ad:’ disclosure, and all posted via the API. And then the link started to take off around 22 hours ago, coinciding with it starting to appear on more and more websites and blogs.

Partly this is down to the advert itself being worthy of comment/repeating. See it for yourself:

But it’s also interesting that The Sun (Or whichever agency/affiliate placed the Magpie advert) is now using paid Twitter advertising – previously the majority of all advertising has been for technology products (with one charity popping up as a one-off).

You can see it’s got around 1457 total clicks today by appending the identifier on the bit.ly url on your own bit.ly info page. And considering the going rate of paid Twitter advertising at the moment, I’d love to know exactly what they’ve paid, but I’d assume it’s been pretty cost effective judging by the prices I’ve seen, and the fact it got picked up by websites following on from the tweets.

The question is whether this was sanctioned by The Sun itself, and whether we’ll see more and more mainstream brands starting to use paid Twitter adverts in addition/instead of using their own accounts or trying to earn Twitter mentions?

In The Sun’s case it definitely makes sense, as their accounts are RSS feeds with less followers than my individual account! e.g. The Sun News, The Sun Bizarre, The Sun Football.