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Making millions on Twitter

December 8, 2009 By Dan Thornton

If you’re looking for an example of a significant financial return on Twitter, then Dell has long been used as an example – and you can expect it to be quoted even more often after revealing revenues have now risen to $6.5 million globally via Twitter.

Of course that requires almost 1.5 million followers for their main @DellOutlet account, Dell Canada, the $800,000 from @DellnoBrasil and over $150,000 from @DellHomeSalesCA , but it’s still a mightily impressive amount.

Key points for the future from Dell Chief Blogger Lionel Menchaca?

Streamline our presence in social media networks, create meaningful content for customers and continue to increase our connections with them in those places
Focus on building a tighter integration between Dell.com, Support.Dell.com, our Dell Community sites with our presence in social networks
Continue our focus on scaling support of social media initiatives into the Dell business units

There’s a few more bits on the Dell post worth reading.

Ad.ly targets celebs with the same old sponsored Tweet model

September 22, 2009 By Dan Thornton

Ad.ly is a self-serve Twitter advertising network matching advertisers and celebrities to tweet about products. The celeb gets to approve or decline messages, and advertisers get tracking for click-through rates, retweets and geographic locations for Retweeters. The celebs set their own price, but Ad.ly gives suggestions, and the celebrity has to tweet four times in the course of a week, netting them five figure sums for each message if they have more than a millions followers.

So that’s Magpie or Izea Sponsored Tweets system just with only celebrities. And apparently that’s enough to have attracted Kim Kardashian, Brooke Burke, Nicole Richie, Brody Jenner, Dr. Drew and Samantha Ronson for the launch.

It’s potentially a good move to only have celebrities involved – that way you only go for the big ticket advertising to generate the share for Ad.ly. But it’s not exactly an evolution of monetising Twitter for individuals.

I’m not going to rant about sponsored tweets as having tested them, I’ve continued to use Magpie on the odd occasion – within a few days each year it effectively pays for my hosting costs, and with a young family and little time to monetise Twitter in other ways, I can just about justify it to myself.

But surely celebrities actually have far more to lose? And less to gain considering the myriad ways which they can effectively monetise their followers and fans through their products? Particularly the hypothetical example Ad.ly is using

Monetise your Twitter account via Direct Messages with Super Chirp!

June 8, 2009 By Dan Thornton

If you’ve got exclusive content, the main way to get value from Twitter followers has been to lead them to your own website – but Super Chirp! aims to change that by monetizing your Direct Messages within Twitter itself.

It’s best suited to celebrities, news outlets or possibly charities, but any publisher can sign up. You set a monthly price between $0.99 and $9.99, and you get to keep a healthy 70% of the cash. Super Chirp! takes 30%, which includes Paypal fees.

As a user, you subscribe for Direct Message feeds via the Super Chirp! site, with Paypal payments, and you can then visit Super Chirp! to see all the messages and sort by publisher.

It’s an interesting concept, and one that’s covered in quite a lot of detail by Michael Arrington over at Techcrunch. In fact, Narendra Rocherolle, CEO of 83 Degrees, which has also launched Power Twitter Firefox Add-On, initially wrote about the idea in a guest post on Techcrunch discussing the Britney Spears Twitter account.

As Arrington hypothesises – this could be one route to cash for Twitter itself, and Super Chirp! could find itself either contending against an official version (perhaps linked in to the new officially verified Twitter accounts), or acquired.

The trickiest bit will be deciding the split between content for building up a network, and content that will be valuable enough to be worth charging for – particularly when it will need to be chunked into 140 character messages. The nature of short messages lends itself to quick links and newsflashes – which is the kind of content which rapidly finds a way around paywalls – possibly leading to a lot of disgruntled ex-followers.

And longer form content will feel immensely disjointed – although there might be some promise in the Twitter novels which have risen up recently, or for some type of Twitter-based soap opera, for example.

But the main way I would imagine most people utilising this tool will be simply to privately broadcast links to exclusive content behind a paywall – which would be an email alert/RSS alternative.

As someone who has experimented with, and witnessed the backlash against, the likes of Magpie adverts being included in streams, and Twitad sponsored backgrounds, it seems slightly ironic that the main 3rd party applications to make money on Twitter appear to be short form versions of traditional display advertising and paywalls – the very things which newspapers are maligned for seeing as the sole revenue options.

Are there better ways to directly generate cash from Twitter when it comes to content? Or is it always going to be a publicity/network tool to drive revenue from elsehwere?

On newspapers, advertisers and social media

March 18, 2009 By Dan Thornton

Russell Davies has a great post on ‘newspapers and all that‘ which looks at the current debate on the future of newspapers and asks where the advertisers/media planners are hiding during the discussion.

As he outlines the reasons why they’re not particularly active in the debate, it echoed my own thoughts – not just on newspapers and magazines, but also about social media. Consumers have jumped all over social media/social networking (175 million+ on Facebook, 133 million+ blogs, Twitter growing fast, Wikipedia essential etc), and celebrities, direct sale companies and media businesses are all getting there pretty quickly – but it’s all being slowed by the reluctance of the majority of advertisers and media planners to adapt to new ways of working, new measurements and new metrics.

Which means the people that will spend money, and the routes to them are evolving quicker than the money which will fund it, and that situation is the slowest one to change.

Mashable monetizes Twitter in an innovative way

March 6, 2009 By Dan Thornton

One way to monetise Twitter seems to be using feeds/information outside of the site itself – good news for sites and businesses, if not for Twitter directly.

Probably the best use so far is by Mashable, revealed today. In conjunction with viral scientist, Mashable contributor and Twitter uber-analyst Dan Zarrella, the site now has a widget displaying ‘Twitter Brand Sponsors’.

Quoting from Mashable:

‘Twitter Brand Sponsors is a small step towards our sociable ads goal. Here’s how it works: a limited number of brands (and one charity!) looking to engage with the social media community can have their latest Tweets syndicated into the Mashable sidebar, and interested visitors can choose to connect with those brands on Twitter.’

The first sponsors are Jetblue and Mailchimp, indicating that there’s interest at launch – it will be interesting to see how many companies are engaged with a suitable Twitter presence to benefit.

And it also removes the questions around the previous example of Glam’s Twitter feed widget, which displayed moderated #Oscar tweets in a widget with advertising:

Is it right to profit from user-generated content created on another site, and without the awareness of those creating the content?

Would advertisers, even those related to the target audience/subject get enough value from display advertising around Twitter content.

Instead, the Mashable approach allows people to see interaction from businesses (and charities), and decide whether or not to engage.

I have to admit, I’m wondering whether they’ll white-label the Twitter widget, as I’d be keen to run something similar!

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