The buzz on Twitter’s business model has been building since quite a while now. Except Biz Stone, everyone else seems impatient and worried about how Twitter will make its money. I knew things are going to take an interesting turn when a friend of mine who doesn’t use Facebook, doesn’t have a blog and who has no idea about what social media means asked me “How does Twitter make money?” (This isn’t fiction, he really leads a web1.0 life)

Anyway, the question made me dig up the past articles on Twitter and also keep tabs on newer ones. For one my pal keeps pestering me with have you come up with an answer phone call every week. So a few days back when we found Wired talking about Twitter and its revenue model with valuable insights from Stone, it definitely intrigued me. One of the suggestions as a possible revenue model, something that I hadn’t thought of till a while back was corporations paying to use the service to stay in touch with their customers.

Bringing Business to Conversations

Social Media circles have always been abuzz with articles mentioning how big corporations are making the most of services like Twitter to their benefit. Comcast’s killer customer service, Dell’s stories are case studies spoken numerous times to convey the strength of conversational marketing and its impact.

Twitter being a message service primarily (though their blog claims its architecture wasn’t developed as one), it is best suited to mobiles than any other web 2.0 product. And that lends it an enormous reach in the long run, maybe wider than any other social media service. It is already growing at over 2 million users a month.

And like the cases mentioned above, it provides a surprisingly direct contact for organizations with their customers. And then the scope suddenly seems huge. Twitter can easily become the marketing marketplace. Firms can buy, yes buy, trademark Handles to interact with their target audience. Twitter on the other hand can provide them more exposure, use summize perhaps to do that and more importantly guide them on how to use Twitter to market effectively without compromising its audience needs in anyway.

Guide Them to Use Twitter Effectively?

I don’t know how sound this suggestion may seem to social media mavens out there, however, this is where the theme of my post begins. This is how Twitter can become the Flag bearer of conversational marketing. I see a lot of company profiles on twitter just shouting out offers on tweets and following zero users back. Where is the conversation here? How is this different from traditional one way marketing?

Yes social media consultants can do this to a certain level, however, they don’t hold millions of users within their fold and being a nascent industry maybe we are yet to create a powerful impact with our words of advice.

Compare this to an entity like Twitter, and what we have is a powerful system, which has access to potential customers of almost any organization. And they telling you on how to use their system effectively, and follow it up with numbers and graph and other reports that everyone comes to expect out of marketing campaigns these days. I don’t see anyone other than Twitter to be in a position to execute this plan, what they bring to the table is a huge credibility as creators of the system.

Also, this can widely open up the vertical of micro blogging marketing services as an industry, it sort of brings a new pie to be cut.

The experience that the firms will get out of using Twitter can very well be duplicated on other social media platforms because essentially everything is based on conversations.

Earlier WAT also reported about the newly placed limit on followers and speculated on a possible Freemium model for Twitter. This sort of fits very well with the strategy above. Users who don’t want limits on their Twitter, or any further possible features that Twitter may decide to add to its services and those who don’t want advertisers contacting them can go for a premium account. While the free users becomes the target audience for the paying corporates.

With the huge number of people already on twitter, and the potentially huge numbers expected on it, the premium users though possible large might end up being a small percentage of the total users. Giving enough reasons for corporate to not mind a certain chunk of audience being out of their reach.

The conversational system

Getting businesses to view social media in the proper perspective is what the industry has been striving since a long time. And though it is fast gaining popularity, it can certainly do with a little million dollar push. Twitter being Twitter has the widest scope in terms of reach in social media platforms, it has a wide base of addicted users and it has money in the kitty already. Can there be a better flag bearer among the social media Olympians?

Image courtesy Nomi and Malcom

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