Digital Media Buzz > Making Money Off Twitter

Making Money Off Twitter

By Sarah Jaferi

Within the limit of 140 characters per tweet, businesses thrive off of Twitter. Monetize, advertise or just simply socialize, Twitter has become a breeding ground for everyone to propagate their tiny declarations.

One example of a company indirectly creating business through Twitter is Witstream, a group of writers and comedians. Witstream is not really a third-party Twitter developer, but they built their own platform that pulls from Twitter. However, they do not need Twitter to function. “It’s more that we became inspired by the medium because comedians and writers were using it so creatively,” says Lisa Cohen of Witstream. “We’re not making money off Twitter per se, but we are greatly expanding on their basic idea to cater to writers and performers who find the medium to be a fun supplement that inspires their more traditional work.”

“Twitter doesn’t appear to have any interest in developing the content for pure entertainment purposes, and further, it falls short in many ways,” she says. “Our goal is to build a brand around that concept and monetize by partnering with a large media company seeking to build their arsenal of content.”

On the other side of Twitter monetization is CoTweet, a San Francisco-based company. CoTweet launched itself for the sole purpose of making money off of Twitter. CoTweet charges its clients $1,500 per month/entry. For this amount, CoTweet users can assign tasks, schedule tweets and designate multiple logins for the same account, among other tricks available to all CoTweet users. But now enterprise-program users will have access to greater data storage, more detailed analytics (reach into certain markets, volume of engagement with customers, response rates) and a heightened level of service from CoTweet. Some of the clients are McDonald’s, Whole Foods, and Coca Cola.

“The reason that we’re rolling it out by invitation only is that we want to make sure we can support the customers that we sign on,” says CoTweet chief executive Jesse Engle. “We’re looking for specifically those companies who have executive support with what they’re doing in social media and who’re in a position to really provide input and to partner with us as we continue to define the emerging requirements for what clients are looking for.”

Here’s a list of ways anyone can monetize from Twitter:

Direct Advertisement
If a lot of people are following you on ‘Twitter’ or in other words if you have a ‘wide reach’ to a large number of Twitter users, you can probably look into direct advertisements for monetization.

Recommendation - You can recommend a particular product or service on behalf of your advertisers and peruse your followers to take an ‘action.’

Promotion - You can help your advertiser to promote a new product or service to your Twitter followers.

It works pretty much like niche marketing. For example, if you are an Internet marketer it is likely that most of your followers on Twitter are also from the same area, which is why they have ‘followed’ you in the first place.

Affiliate Marketing
According to Shoemoney’s podcast, affiliate marketing can actually be blended within Twitter.

Affiliate Links - If you are recommending a product or a service to your followers, you can always embed your affiliate link in your tweet. (e.g. using a service like TinyUrl.com)

Sales Pages - Instead of taking your followers to another website using your affiliate link, you might just want to promote your own product and services and sell them directly via your sales / landing page.

This is an area where every one can really look into. For instance say when one of your followers is asking for suggestions to choose a Web host, you can always suggest him the best one from your experience but at the same time use your affiliate link that can earn you some quick cash.

Sponsored Contest
An advertiser may want to run a contest via a popular Twitter user to get feedback about his product and services or just to create some brand awareness.

Feedback - Example: “What New features would you like to see in Product X”?

Brand Awareness - Example: “Describe Product X in 140 Characters” or “Tell us why you like Product X within 140 characters.” The best answer can be given a cool prize sponsored by the advertiser.

Sponsored Advertisements
There isn’t must difference between this and a direct advertisement. However, when the mind map was created, this ‘branch’ did somehow pop in, so they decided to include it. The main difference would be that all the tweets that are actually sponsored advertisements can get a predefined prefix, which will help your followers to identify them as ads.

Auto Ads - There can be a mechanism or a ‘new’ third-party service that can actually help you to distribute or tweet the “Ads” when you are ‘not’ tweeting or say when you are idle. An ad interval can also be set so that your frequently sponsored ads don’t annoy your followers.

Sponsored Actions - Well this might sound like a weird idea but some aggressive marketers might like it. Example: “I Love #Google. Re-tweet this message and WIN yourself a GPhone.” Since a hash-tag is used, all the messages can be tracked using that and a lucky winner can actually be picked from the pool.

This brings us to the question as to whether or not ‘monetizing’ off of Twitter is ethical, and how it affects the integrity of Twitter itself. But when it comes down to it, while one person is abstaining from Twitter monetization, the other is cashing in. However, if you want your followers to consider you a valuable contact, you should set a ‘limit’ on how many ’such tweets’ you are going to do in one day.