NEW DELHI An Indian health portal is close to signing a special endorsement deal with Bollywood actress Priyanka Chopra, not for her strikingly good looks but for the 4.2 million followers that she has on Twitter. She will tweet about the portal.

Celebrities in India, like their counterparts in the West, have started including social media like Twitter and Facebook in their brand endorsement contracts or are getting paid separately for tweeting about brands, as marketers scurry to reach their online fan base.Several big and small celebrities and sports stars including Chetan Bhagat, Anusha Dandekar, Shruti Haasan and Unmukt Chand have already started raking in the moolah through social media deals with brands, while others such as cricketer Yuvraj Singh are close to such contracts, their managers say.“Twitter is a very big aspect of a celeb’s reach. Sponsored tweets are certainly gaining traction in India,” says Bunty Sajdeh, chief executive officer of Cornerstone Sport & Entertainment that manages endorsements for celebrities and sportsmen like Sonakshi Sinha, Virat Kohli, Prabhu Deva and Sania Mirza.Sajdeh says he has had discussions with brands on including social media in endorsement contracts but he always insisted that it should be separate contract and a separate discussion.Social media contracts, which include Twitter, Facebook, blogs, Instagram and websites of celebrities, cost a brand up to 25% of a traditional endorsement contract with a celebrity.Vinita Bangad, founder of Krossover Entertainment that manages Priyanka Chopra and Shah Rukh Khan, while confirming Chopra’s social media deal says, “Talks are on with a few more brands.”In the past, Krossover Entertainment helped VJ Anusha Dandekar ink social media contracts with ITC and Crocs shoes.Anusha tweeted about Crocs shoes with pictures while the brand on its Facebook page also made sure that her association was hyped up.Online apparel and accessories brand American Swan signed actress Shruti Haasan and cricketer Unmukt Chand in similar deals earlier this year. The brand organised live chat sessions for fans to connect with them, which the celebrities actively promoted on their social media handles including Twitter.“These were 2-3 month-long contracts which were targeted to connect with the right set of audience in a focused manner,” Anurag Rajpal, director and chief executive officer of The American Swan Lifestyle, says.He says deals like these can range anywhere between Rs 10 lakh to Rs 30 lakh for three months, but depend on the popularity of the celebrity in the digital space.For brands, social media deals are far more cost effective than traditional endorsement deals, particularly in the case of top stars. For instance, if a star charges Rs 1.5 crore for a traditional brand endorsement contract for one year, the person would charge just over Rs 35 lakh for a social media deal.Social media deal, however, costs at least 1.5 times that of what a brand pays to advertise in the online space.Then there are celebrities who are getting paid per tweet by brands and that could go up to Rs 5-7 lakh per tweet for a celebrity who has about two million followers.“Today, social media certainly has the power to influence customers and brands,” says Shailendra Singh, joint managing director of Percept.Earlier this year, cricketer Yuvraj Singh, who has over two million followers on Twitter, was requested by Birla Sunlife Insurance, a brand that he has been endorsing for a while, to tweet one of the brand’s campaign after his recovery from cancer.While he did not charge the brand for that tweet, Singh’s manager Nishant Arora says many companies have started approaching the cricketer for separate social media contracts. “A few deals are likely to be announced in the next couple of months,” Arora says.Writer Chetan Bhagat, with 1.2 million followers, is a prolific tweeter but says only a very small number of his total tweets are related to the brands he endorses or shows he does on TV. “My followers want to know about me and not the brands, which is why I make sure that I do not abuse my fans by pushing some brand message across,” he says.Bhagat, though, is often found tweeting about new launches from Huawei or about Shaadi.com, two brands that he endorses. “Financial considerations too are involved at times,” he says.Not every celebrity, however, is comfortable with monetising their fan base on Twitter and Facebook. “They aren’t very comfortable doing promotions for a brand on their Twitter timeline. It’s a personal space and they want to keep their association with their fans authentic,” says Anirban Das Blah, founder of celebrity management company Kwan that works with actors like Akshay Kumar, Deepika Padukone, Ranbir Kapoor and Nargis Fakri.What some big celebrities are comfortable with, though, is discreetly, tastefully and aesthetically done tweets when it comes to brand promotions.In the West, especially the US and UK, however, celebrities often use Twitter to promote brands unabashedly.It was reported that Kim Kardashian, who has a whopping 18 million Twitter followers, could earn around 7,000 pounds for a single tweet mentioning a specific product. Others like Elizabeth Hurley, Victoria Beckham, Justin Bieber and Wayne Rooney have all tweeted about brands that pay them either per tweet or have endorsement contracts with them.