Okay, so it's the night before our exam is due and for ONCE in my academic career I've finished ahead of time. Figures. The one time waiting until the last minute may have been a good idea.
I just came across an article that mentioned DELL (as in the computer manufaturer) released the fact that is has made over $3mm in sales from clicks through Twitter over the past two years. Okay, so perhaps this seems like a relatively small amount of revenue for a company that made almost $13b in revenue in the first quarter of 2009, but I was fairly impressed. I mean, Dell only has about 600,000 followers on Twitter and again, the number of people (as a % of the population) that is even ON Twitter yet is very small. If they can generate that kind of revenue with a small following, imagine what they could do if Twitter was even more mainstream.
But again, this post is about monetizing Twitter. Basically at this point, Twitter allows a company like Dell to post coupons, links and other sales information without charge. Let's imagine that instead, they charge a click thru fee or even an action based fee. Moreover, Twitter could even put coupons or information of various companies together (like beauty or tech) in one stream for users to follow. Of all the different ideas circulating for how to monetize the site, to me this one is the most obvious because it doesn't impact the user at all. Once you give users something for free, it is almost impossible to start charging them for it without making them unhappy. In addition, the companies get something out of it because they will see increased revenues, especially if the coupons are aggregated into one stream based on interest. Finally, I believe this is even superior to slipping in an advertisement every 10th tweet or so, again because it is virtually invisible to the end user.
I think Twitter should jump on this. Now. Yesterday even.
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