Apparently, Visa and Inuit want a piece of Square. On Twitter, that it.

It turns out Visa and Intuit have been buying advertising space on the #Square hashtag on Twitter. This week, Intuit is promoting its Square alternative GoPayment and its GoPayment blog. Last week, it was Visa on the #Square.

Interestingly, #Square is a relatively low-volume hashtag. By my unscientific assessment, the hashtag generates about two tweets every 20 minutes. By comparison, the #SteveJobs was generating what seemed like hundreds of tweets a second in the immediate wake of the Apple founder’s death this week.

Ad campaigns on Twitter cost at least $5,000 per month.

Of course, the irony here is that Square was founded by Jack Dorsey, who co-founded — you guessed it — Twitter.

It should be noted that #Square does not always yield tweets about Square — the payments company, that is. Today, for example, The @daily_astrodata feed published a whole series of tweets on (I think) the positions of various celestial bodies. It just so happens that #square relates to astrological data; don’t ask me how, although perhaps Visa and Intuit know.

VISA ATOP #SQUARE

INTUIT’S GOPAYMENT PROMOTED AT #SQUARE