My Monetization/Business Plan for Twitter

Looks like it's trendy to talk about how Twitter can make money. There are already user-contributed business plans for Twitter.

I haven't looked into details of all these plans/blogs. But I do have some thoughts about how I'd go about monetizing Twitter as if I am Twitter's product manager:

First, I'd just forget about conventional online advertising(CPC/CPM).

• people are on twitter to have conversations. If you are an advertiser that only cares about getting people off Twitter and go to your site, you don't really use Twitter's conversation workflow to market. You are working against Twitter users' behavior.
• advertisers love to know about impressions and measure click-through rates. But how can you measure a tweet's impressions when the tweet is consumed by api-enabled tools? It's also very intrusive to insert ads in tweets because they are already very short!

Here are the products Twitters should develop to make money:

• market/user research services
  • sentiment analysis - analyze users' opinions about a particular event, product, brand, person, and give insights about trends. Facebook is doing the same thing
  • monitor & analytic - monitor and analyze how a piece of content travels in twitter and give insights on how to optimize the viral distribution
  • segment users into different categories, eg: shoppers, sports fan, video game fans, book lovers, mom with baby
  • let users opt-in to participate in the following targeted offerings(they implicitly opt in when they follow a user that provides the offerings):
    • free sample, coupon, promotional tweets
    • targeted user research/questionnaire/surveys/feedback/usability testing/contest. feedbackarmy lets you do user usability testing through Amazon Mechanical Turk. Twitter has much much more users with diversified backgrounds. Peanut Lab has gained traction by providing online search services that taps into various social networks.
• Micropayment service
  • Offer virtual points/payments to users participating in market/user research. Users can use points to redeem trials, samples or even buy products etc. The kicker is that the user can automatically tweet about his/her purchases of goods or services with the micropayment. so this is more like a recommendation tweet based on one's real purchase pattern.
• Premium account( mainly for business. no matter how hard one argues, brands do belong on twitter )
  • allow multiple sub-accounts under one main account. eg: twitter.com/amazon.com/support, twitter.com/amazon.com/deals, twitter.com/amazon.com/bugreport, twitter.com/amazon.com/presale
  • each account can be granted access to a user based on roles/permissions.
  • monitor reputation and brand, similar to what biz360 is doing.
  • monitor competitor's reputation. gain insights on competitors' weaknesses and blunders.
  • profile and segment one's followers - what they like, dislike, etc.
  • provide insight of why/how you gain or loss followers.
• provide a built-in URL shorterning service
  • it allows Twitter to track click-through as well as acting as a conversion tracking service. Conversion tracking is very important for anyone that wants to get insights into their marketing campaigns on twitter.
  • Twitter takes full responsibility of getting rid of links to malicious content/malware/spyware/adware and make Twitter a safer place.
• API Service
  • tiered developer programs - basic API access is free. If you want more data more frequently, please pay.
  • offer real-time alert/filter service through API. News sites would love to scout breaking news.

Twitter has tons of public data(conversations). There are so many opportunities to monetize them. The challenge is how to analyze millions of unstructured data(conversations) and make the outcome actionable.

What are your thoughts on Twitter's monetization strategies?

Tags: twitter product_management monetization data brand monitor