Twitter one step closer to viable business model

Valerie | 26 Mar 2009, 16:06

Twitter, the microblogging social media platform, has launched a web site sponsored by Microsoft Corp. called “ExecTweets”. 

The site aims to “aggregate the tweets of top business execs and empower the community to surface the most insightful, business-related tweets”.  Contributors include executives at major global companies and organisations, including Coca-Cola, Uniliver and the Lance Armstrong Foundation, allowing those executives to talk directly to millions of Twitter users.

Founded in 2006, Twitter has more than five million users, making it the third most popular social networking site after Facebook and MySpace.  In recent months, the focus of much media and analyst speculation and interest has been on how social media sites can develop commercially viable business models.  This was also the subject of a recent blog post Monetising content - end of the free lunch in which we discussed the ‘Freemium’ model posed by Chris Long at Wired as the way forward for Web 2.0 companies. According to the WSJ.com, whilst professional networks like LinkedIn have built a business model by selling user data to recruitment firms, purely social networks like Facebook and MySpace have struggled, particularly as growth in display advertising has declined as a result of the recession.

Online analysts have already observed that although hardly revolutionary, Exec Tweets throws open the doors to monetisation, enabling Twitter to make money from advertising the service. Brands meanwhile will be looking to use the wealth of data on Twitter to provide valuable services in the future.  Suggestions also abound that Twitter could drive revenues by giving users the opportunity to pay to appear in the ‘suggested followers’ box, with a high probability Twitter could sell a premium version of its service to companies as a marketing tool, or that it may even wind up charging consumers for access to its platform.