Pay With A Tweet, Like, or Plus
Here’s the story: you have just finished creating your latest awesome peice of content or product. It’s sat there on your site and is being read/listened to/watched/downloaded by your regular visitors but the downloads are minimal, it really isn’t getting a lot of views yet and certainly not going viral.
How can you help get it shared? Well, one way is to offer the content or download via a pay with a tweet (or like or plus) system. The basic premise is that in order for the user to get access to what you have done they need to tweet a message, or hit the like or plus one button.
Whilst I recommend only using this system for simple things such as ebooks and content, American Express has recently decided to start offering the ability to pay for actual real life products with a tweet!
When it comes to actually implementing these systems there a re a few options available to you.
Paying with a tweet was one of the first systems available, the current options are:
Pay With a Tweet
This is a free service and is really easy to use, just fill out the form with your details and you will get an embed code that you can add to the site. On clicking and tweeting the users will be sent to the appropriate link to get their swag!
Get my FREE ebook!
The service has expended since it’s origins and now the user can use Twitter or Facebook to get the content. They even provide a QR code you can use on printed or digital media as well!
ReTweet for Discount
This is an interesting one, but it isn’t free.
The system allows you to offer a discount on a product instead of providing it for free (though that functionality is available). In order to actually get the software, you need to use the tweet system itself (you do get a discount!) which was kind of un-intuitive, but kind of cool at the same time.
This script costs $19 (with the discount).
Pay with a Like
This plugin by wpmudev allows you to easily add a “pay wall” to your content, and users can use tweets, likes or +1’s to get access to the content. It’s a nice system because as it is a WordPress plugin rather than just a script, it has allowed them to add in extra features such as statistics monitoring and even getting a random page on your site liked (now that could be useful!)
It’s a premium plugin requiring either WPMUDev membership or a one off fee of $19.
WP Like 2 Get
Continuing with the plugins, WP Like 2 Get is another and this time free system to get your content shared, though this time only downloads, not written/embedded content. The system isn’t quite as polished as Pay with a Like for instance their is no in built stats, but you can link things to your Google Analytics account, so by no means is this a bad plugin, in fact it is quite good for what it does.
Pay with a +1
This is neither a plugin are a prebuilt script, instead it is a tutorial from Ben Pritchard on how you can leverage the Google Plus API to enable pay with a +1. Really good post, but not for the beginner.
CodeCanyon
Code canyon has several WordPress plugins available that does content locking.
Viral Lock
Viral Lock is another content locking system, which allows users to use Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus to unlock it. I haven’t test the features in full on this but the demo works well. It uses a shortcode system so you can have teaser content before it which is awesome.
This is a nice looking plugin, it allows you to lock the page/post and have a short teaser content. The stats section is also pretty detailed.
WordPress Viral Marketing & Viral Payment Pack
WordPress Viral Marketing & Viral Payment Pack has the big 3 social networks that can be used to pay for the content/download, but it also has the ability to enter an email address as well which is good. However, this is a widget so it can only go in widgetised areas like sidebars which is a bit limiting really.
Should you use this system?
Not for everything that’s for sure. You would need to think what is an ideal situation to use it. For me, I’m not a fan of restricting (most) content this way but it is great for small ebooks or videos that you want to promote.
The other concern is security, as in most situations if someone wants to circumnavigate the tweet system, it may well be possible.
And then there are the “take backs”. Those who pay with a tweet, like or +1 and then once they have what they want, delete, unlike and unplus the content. There’s no getting away from these sorts of people but it is something to bear in mind when deciding what content will go behind the tweet wall.
03/26/2013 @ 11:50 pm
I really like the look of this one: Social Locker for WordPress
Excellent information as usual Dean! What sort of information would you use these sort of features on personally? Maybe a free downloads section on a website? To get access to all the free downloads a site has to offer they must first like, tweet/follow, or +1?
03/27/2013 @ 12:05 am
Well, the most common way is to limit it to a single piece of content/product. That way it helps maximise the the number of tweets. With what you suggested you would get 1 tweet/like etc for a whole bunch of content, whereas if you split it up you would get more. Of course it’s a balance, you put too much behind a tweet wall and people will get annoyed with it. So just using select items is probably the best way. I would use this sort of systyem with a free ebook or video which helps the user, that way they get “rewarded” with some quality content above the norm.