Twitter Money

Twitter has been a very popular social networking medium since its founding in 2006. Some of the basics, which you may already know, are the messages are limited to 140 characters, the service is free on the Website, each member has a profile available to other Tweeters, and you can send your messages right from the Twitter site. You can follow an entire list of members, the list being created by other members, or you can pick whom to follow one at a time. There are many external apps available to send messages, as well as to obtain followers; there are so many of these we will talk about only a few later in this article. 

Wikipedia says Twitter has raised over $57 million USD from various venture capital investors, but, so far, there is no evidence they have ever made a dime in revenue in spite of their popularity and rapid growth. This situation led the Industry Standard to say Twitter may not last too long because there appears to be no way for them to make money. Some on Twitter’s board believe a possible revenue source could be from some kind of e-commerce plan because users should be willing to buy from Twitter since they are using it to promote their own revenue sources. Outsiders have created much discussion of ways Twitter might begin to make money. This article discusses three possible revenue strategies Twitter could use to become a billion dollar business within two years. These models depend on Twitter being up to its potential scale (critical mass, about as large as it will get before growth slows). It’s about there now, as growth slowed last year (2009).

ADVERTISING
 Well targeted ads could be spaced among Tweets, say every 10th, or 20th, or 100th Tweet. If done like this, the ads should not become objectionable to most people.

SMS (SHORT MESSAGE SERVICE, LIKE TEXTING) ADVERTISING
Twitter could turn on SMS advertising at any time with the largest inventory recipients in the world. Most users would be OK with this if they were spaced every 100 or so Tweets. In addition to revenue for Twitter, could this large number of advertising prospects possibly attract a large buyer, like a carrier, or Google?

SUBSCRIPTION
Some observers say about 5% of users would be willing to pay a price for almost 100% uptime. If you have used Twitter for any length of time you will know there are frequent down times for the Website. They could also add some special subscription features like storage and other accessories. This does not look like a good choice because of the expected limited subscriber base.

We mention Twitter’s no-revenue situation as an introduction to our present article. The purpose of every home based entrepreneur is to make money for their business. It’s better to have several sources of income, rather than just one; the fact that Twitter is so easy to use, and free, makes it a great extra income source. That’s what the rest of this discussion is about.

Here, in this January, 2010, article, there is talk about the fact Twitter has 75 million users; the rate of growth has slowed, and many of these do not participate. This report says only 17% of Twitter users actually participate with tweets�but, there are so many accounts this still means 10 to 15 million active users. This is quite a nice group of captives for any advertising you may choose. The problem for entrepreneurs is how to reach this group. We will try to help you with a bit of market research we found.

A recent study separated tweeters into these categories: News, Spam, Self-promotion, Pointless babble, Conversational, and Pass-along value. Babble was most used with 40.55%, conversation accounted for 37.55%, and pass-along (Retweets) had 8.70% of usage. It is encouraging that spam was toward the bottom with only 3.75%; that goes a long way toward discouraging complaints about advertisers resorting to spam on Twitter. This article by a Microsoft researcher, questions the “pointless babble” category in the study. She makes valid points that much of the babble is necessary phatic communication (includes “Hi or “Thank you), which does social work, not just a conveyor of information. To be clear, the definition of phatic is “denoting speech used to express or create an atmosphere of shared feelings, goodwill, or sociability rather than to impart information.” 

Another point about babble is the majority of people become twitterers because they want to be social�what they are doing online is really a mix of social grooming and peripheral social awareness. Pay attention to these three categories, babble, conversation, and pass-along. They may be channels for your advertising approaches. Together, they account for almost 87% of all Twitter messages�surely any of us can find targets in this large number of twitterers to be receptive to our messages.

Twitter has been derided by news anchors, like Brian Williams, and others. Do you suppose it’s a fear of losing listeners (ad revenue) because they cannot compete with Twitter on breaking news items? Twitter is Twitter, used in many different ways by a lot of people. If you don’t see any value, please don’t use it.
This article is about making money using Twitter, but an important requisite for getting your message out using this medium is to have some followers, that is, people who receive all your tweets. Though it is uncertain how many followers one must have to conduct effective advertising on Twitter, you certainly don’t need a million, as a few celebrities have. It should also be fairly clear a zero following won’t work, either. The point is, work constantly to build a reasonable following, and begin your advertising routine while you are doing it. If you make your message good enough to get some retweets, your ad could go viral and be spread all over the place. Let’s discuss a few ways to build your list.

From my own experience, just the act of posting a few messages each day will begin to generate followers, so you must do this once or twice a day every day. There are many other things you can do, in an organized way, to get a reasonable following on Twitter. Some of the best ideas about getting a following on Twitter are presented by the founder of Digg in this article; actually this is a very good short review of how to use Twitter. Here are some of the more important ideas about followers.

RETWEETING
Encourage people to retweet (@yourtwitterusername) your tweets, then track when people retweet your messages using http://retweetist.com/, a free service. Retweeting is a viral technique which can expand your coverage quickly.

BIO
Be sure to accurately describe yourself in the bio section of your Twitter site. This shows up in all your Twitter listings and provides valuable information for those who may follow you. Do not leave it blank.

DRIVE PEOPLE TO YOUR TWITTER ACCOUNT
You can do this by using link buttons on your Website, LinkedIn, Facebook, your e-mails, and any other places you can think of. You can find great buttons to do this, for free, at TwitterCounter.

USE #HASH TAGS
This is a way to make your most important posts available in one place, easy for readers to find. There is too much to say about #hash tags here, but you can find more than you ever thought you wanted to know here; it’s free. Learn how to use #hash tags. It is important to become active with #hash tag subjects by getting into some of their conversations; it’s another way to communicate with a broad range of Twitter members.

PICTURES
How many of you know you can upload pictures to your tweets? You can, using the free service TwitPic. There are also mobile apps available for iPhone and other systems; you can find these on Google, if you need them. Pictures will remarkably increase viewers for your tweets; it’s sort of like YouTube�pictures just draw readers.

PAY ATTENTION TO TOP TWITTERERS
See what the leaders are saying and doing at the free http://twitterholic.com/. If appropriate, do what they do. No need to reinvent the wheel.

WHO IS FOLLOWING AND WHO IS LEAVING
TwitterCounter shows new followers, and Qwitter will e-mail you when someone leaves you after some post you made. These services are free and may help you in your efforts to gain followers.
There are many other ways to gain followers, many mentioned in this article. These two methods are different:

Ask questions: This may start a conversation; don’t ask anything difficult or argumentative.
Tweet at these times: Weekdays in the US, tweet most during business hours, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. People get away from computers on weekends, so avoid Saturdays and Sundays; not entirely, maybe, but don’t expect too much weekend traffic. There are some exceptions to this rule, like an advertising pitch to busy workers is more effective after 10 PM at night when people are planning their next day; also, some people will be using their computers on weekends, especially during the current jobless economy. Try combinations of these times to see what happens.

Now, let’s look a some ways people are actually making money using Twitter. Many of these involve brick and mortar establishments, but some of these started as simple home based entrepreneurs; the point is, what they are doing can be duplicated by very small businesses by using your entrepreneurial creativity. Before going further, here is a warning from the BBB about various Twitter schemes scammers are pitching. The main problem is conditions included in the offer where, if you do not specifically request to be dropped at a particular time, you could begin to be billed every month for up to $100 a month, or more. You may be just as well off using the information in our article, rather than paying big bucks for a plan you know nothing about.

Our review of actual money makers begins with several in an Inc. magazine article.

GET HELP FROM FOLLOWERS
Threadless, a wildly successful marketer of custom T-shirts, gotquick results by developing a way for Twitterers to respond with tweets on the Threadless Website by submitting T-shirt suggestions. The submissions were then voted on by viewers and the best ones ended up on T-shirts. In just five months the promotion brought hundreds of thousands of dollars in new revenue, and added one million followers to the Threadless Twitter account, all of which are potential customers. Threadless also asked followers to retweet some of their special sales to others; great viral marketing.

SELL PRODUCTS
Woot is an online retailer with six separate shops, each selling one deeply discounted product each day. In 2007 the company started sending tweets about its special for that day, with the message going out at midnight every night. A few hours later, when 90% of that day’s inventory has been sold, Woot sends out an alert to tell people to act quickly if they want the discounted product. Since they began this advertising on Twitter, Woot’s sales have more than doubled. The company limits its tweets to 110 characters, or less, so there is room for recipients to retweet. Viral marketing is powerful.

FIND LEADS ON TWITTER
One small New York apartment manager, with only 200 followers, gets about 100 leads a month by sending a few specially targeted messages every day. They get their potential targets by using the Twitter search function at http://www.search.twitter.com, and enter about 10 search terms relative to your business. When someone tweets using one of these terms, you can harvest their Twitter address and send a message about your product or service. Two other free services to help with leads are TweetDeck and DemandSpot.

FIND CUSTOMERS (MORE CORRECTLY, STEER CUSTOMERS TO YOUR STORE)
Kogi Korean BBQ, located in Los Angeles, operates four food carts that move to promising locations all over the city. In a short period of time they have acquired 50,000 or so customers on their list; when they move to a new location they use Twitter to tell all these customers where they are. Kogi says about 10% of customers learned of the location from Twitter.

ANOTHER WAY TO MAKE TWITTER MONEY
Jeremy Shoemaker is a very successful money making blogger who also uses a Twitter based approach for several income sources. Some of his comments in this article point to a relatively new marketing idea from advertising network IZEA. The idea is SponsoredTweets, an online marketplace allowing advertisers to have sponsored conversations through Twitter; the advertisers pay selected Twitter members for making these sponsored tweets. It works this way:

1. To use SponsoredTweets, just set your price, choose a category and a few keywords, then wait for advertisers to contact you.
   
   
2. Accept or reject the offers when they come in.
   
   
3. Get paid as soon as your account reaches $50 USD.

SponsoredTweets is a subsidiary of IZEA, backed by $10 million in venture capital; they are accredited by the BBB.

YET ANOTHER WAY TO MAKE MONEY FROM TWITTER
Ad.ly is another money maker recommended and used by Jeremy Shoemaker, and described in this November, 2009, article. Ad.ly, is a new advertising network that inserts ads once per day into your Twitter messages. They will ask you if it’s OK to post the message. It works like this:

1. Create an Ad.ly account and authorize use of your Twitter account.
   
   
2. Accept or deny an advertiser's message.
   
   
3. Set your price (Ad.ly will help you to some extent with pricing).
   
   
4. Ad.ly will deliver the approved advertiser message into your feed.

Both SponsoredTweets and Ad.ly have some elements of uncertainty. For example, we know nothing about the algorithms these sponsors use to determine which of you will be offered a chance to transmit their message. Is it number of followers, quality and quantity of your tweets, or what? There is no way to know, meaning you don’t know if you will receive offers, or how many offers you may get. Another uncertainty revolves around how much you should charge for a successful sponsored tweet. I have read of several home based entrepreneurs, charging only $1, who claim to be making up to a few hundred dollars every month. Doesn’t sound like very much money, but, if this is just one of several sources of income, they all add up to more money for you. Jeremy Shoemaker, with his very large following everywhere, may charge $200 to $400, or even more, for a sponsored ad. Think of the large monthly payoff he has. The point here is, for your first offers, make your price reasonable, maybe less than $20; however, if your followers number in the thousands, perhaps you can get more. Also, remember you have more chances with other offers giving you the ability to experiment a bit.

A recap of the more important points we’ve discussed includes these techniques to gain readership and followers on Twitter:

• Use some kind of link button on your Websites, blogs,, e-mails, and anywhere else you are on the web pointing to your Twitter address (mine is http://twitter.com/furriwhale).
  
  
• Try to start viral marketing by encouraging retweets (RT).
  
  
• Use pictures, another way to go viral.
  
  
• Ask questions to start a conversation; keep it simple. My first try was one requiring deep though. My only answer was from someone saying this was something nobody wants to touch!
  
  
• Sell products, like the Woot example.
  
  
• Use Twitter to obtain leads (possibly the most important thing we have discussed)

CAUTION
Use any advertising sparingly on Twitter; Woot and Kogi only tweet about two times each day. Too much advertising will drive away followers because most tweeters do it for social relationships.
Do use Twitter to bring extra revenue to you. If you don’t seriously try it, you will never know if it works or not.