Do Bollywood stars charge for promotional tweets?

Yes! That’s the new trend catching up in Bollywood. Which has been a popular endorsement technique in the west, is now picking up pace in tinselville and celebrities charge lakhs per tweet. Lakhs!

Bollywood celebrities like Priyanka Chopra, Sonakshi Sinha, Shahid Kapoor, Neha Dhupia and Kapil Sharma among others are leading the bandwagon and charge anything between 1-12 lakhs per tweet, depending upon their fan-base and popularity.

A report published in Economic Times posted the statistics and elaborated that celebrities these days are lapping up endorsement deals on Twitter. Most celebrities have brand managers who handle their social accounts, and at times post on their behalf too.

Uday Singh Gauri, CEO of talent management firm Exceed Entertainment to ET, “Electronic brands to companies like Hindustan Unilever and everyone in between use celebrity paid tweets these days. The reach and effectiveness of these tweets is massive. Earlier, companies used to pay a lot more to do events with a celebrity to reach just a few hundred or thousand consumers. Now with just one celebrity tweet they can reach over millions of potential customers." 

"These days more than half of celebrity tweets are sponsored and the growth rate of celebrity tweets in India is more than 50%," said a senior executive at a celebrity management company. 

"But following the recent controversy around Maggi, A listers have become cautious. For instance, Priyanka Chopra won't tweet about a product unless she has used it herself or is convinced about it, no matter how much the brand pays her," added the senior media executive. 

While Sonakshi charges anything between 4-5 lakhs per tweet, Priyanka and Shahid get paid anything around 10-12 lakhs per 140 characters.

Now that’s a whopping sum for just one tweet! Isn’t it? 

source: ECONOMIC TIMES