If you’ve been living in a cave and aren’t familiar with Twitter, feel free to “follow me” and see what it’s all about. But I’m writing this post under the assumption that you’ve heard of it and/or are already on there.

Twitter is amazing. It’s such a tremendous marketing tool it almost feels like cheating, using it to get people more interested in your product or services.

I’ve been introduced to tons of awesome new stuff by following links posted by cool people on Twitter and most of the requests for quotes I get these days are a direct result of my personal Twitter activity.

Now, what do you do when you know Twitter can help grow your business (or at least send more traffic to your website and/or blog) but you have no time to use it? Or what if you want to use Twitter but you’re aware that your poor grammar and spelling could detract from your brand (seriously, some people do still care about spelling and grammar)?

Believe it or not, you can hire people to tweet for you.

Is using a ghost tweeter ethical?

Yes and no.

If you want to reap the rewards of Twitter by hiring someone to pretend they’re you, tweeting about the sandwich you’re eating or the movie you watched last night…well…I think you might as well just shut ‘er down.

I would suggest that if you don’t have the time to invest in building relationships with your followers and you want someone to pretend they’re you so you don’t have to, that you shouldn’t even be allowed to have a Twitter account.

All it takes for you to really start doing some meaningful relationship building on Twitter is about fifteen minutes a day.

• Check in before you start working for the day, maybe with an update about what your day has in store.
• Check in before lunch to tell your followers how your day is going, or to share a link you found or to retweet something cool.
• Check in later in the afternoon and then again when you’re finishing up for the day.

That’s it. That’s all it takes.

If you want to hire someone to post stuff as you in between those times, fill your boots. If you trust someone enough to sound like you, go ahead and let that person link to one of your recent blog posts or to an article you were featured in. I just don’t think you should be outsourcing your personal tweets to someone because to me, that feels wrong.

I think it’s fine to outsource what I consider to be “corporate” tweets to a ghostwriter or tweeter or whatever you want to call that person.

I do this for several business. I will go through a company’s website, blog posts, articles – basically all existing content – and come up with cute/informative/funny/interesting tweets and send those back to the client who generally gives them to his/her assistant to take from there and enter into SocialOomph or something similar.

So that’s it. That’s how ghost tweeting works. In my opinion, ghost tweeting isn’t entirely unethical, but there’s a fine line as far as I’m concerned. My advice is to do what you feel comfortable with, but I really hope you don’t knowingly try to deceive your followers because they’re following you not me. Know what I mean?

What are your thoughts? Hiring someone to tweet for you…ethical or not? Please share your thoughts, I know you have some!

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