Twitter Value: Community or Business?
Everybody seems to have the golden answer for how Twitter could potentially monetize it’s service, and co-founder Biz Stone has shot down many of them as detracting from the user experience that is helping Twitter achieve it’s break neck growth. A number of celebrities (both through media and the web) have been monetizing Twitter through sponsored tweets from such places as Izea’s http://sponsoredtweets.com which connects brands with publishers, although only those with large follower bases seem to able to make this profitable enough for their time.
The real question to ask is not what Twitter should do in order to monetize the traffic and user base that they have, but rather where the greatest value lies (assuming they don’t go for saturation). The common school of thought is that Twitter should just tap into the gold mine of standard advertisements placed into feeds that would inject the community with sponsored information but would ultimately dilute their brand. Biz Stone and others have greatly discounted this as a viable, long-term solution and have rather stated that adding layers of value for power and business users would be the key to long term success and profitability of the business.
So you may be asking, “But if Twitter is offering tools to power users and businesses, wouldn’t those tools just be ways to monetize their feeds?”. The answer is not quite so simple because it all depends on what types of value Twitter would be adding in which they could charge accounts for. These businesses and power users need to see a positive ROI for their monthly investment, however this return could be in the form of user engagement with their brand, metrics for measuring the level of engagement, as well as tools to seek out the squeaky wheels in their clientele to retain their brand image.
Most “power users” of Twitter would love to see Twitter opening up a marketplace to completely displace Izea’s Sponsored Tweets and other third party solutions providers. However, while this would offer short term gains for the company I think that their long term relevance lies in providing tools to boost brand engagement, tracking and mediation.
This does not exclude the possibility of a very powerful Twitter advertising network to come out and temporarily dominant the market (assuming they take a small cut of the advertiser/consumer relationship) and force Twitters hand into buying out said network to maintain control of their brand and how the community is effected from a usability standpoint.
How do you think Sponsored Tweet’s and other networks like it are going to effect the Twitter brand and consumer usability? Are followers going to lose the strong trust and high conversion value that they currently posses due to a dilution of Tweet authenticity?
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