A Twittering World

A microblogging website , that lets user post about “what they are doing” ,in just 140 characters, whose basic idea sprung up from a simple status message concept from Instant Messengers like Gtalk, Yahoo Messenger etc, Twittering has become the next generic name and an Internet buzzword , alongside Googling , Digging and Facebooking……

With the growing buzz , Twitter has also been flooded with celebrity pages , with several high profile people creating a Twitter page for them , to update their fans about their schedules, events,photos etc.
The list has included everyone from Lance Armstrong, Oprah Winfrey , Britney Spears, Mariah Carey , Coldplay , Chris Cornell , Larry King and even sports teams like LA Lakers, NFL etc

Infact it has not even spared the political world , where the likes of Barack Obama and 10 Downing Street are constantly using it to reach out to their people and listen to their queries . For a fact . Obama’s Twitter page has almost 1.05 million followers whereas 10 Downing Street has a half million viewers.

comScore reports that 9.3 million people worldwide used Twitter in March, up from 4.3 million in February, growth it partly attributes to the large amount of media coverage Twitter has received.

Revenue Model

Twitter co founder , Biz Stone says , they are trying to create value for their consumers and once the “Twitting” fad grows into a larger phenomenon , they would start on their revenue generation spree by targetting companies .
Twitting experts on the other hand feel , that traditional advertising will not work for this microblogging site , and Twitter must adopt an entirely different strategy to make money out of this site.
As Kotler says , “The aim of marketing is to make selling unnecessary”

Revenue need not come only from ads. Twitting updates from users across the world, about their activities , at a given point of time , at a given place , can lead to enormous customer insights which can be further sold to major firms including market research agencies , and at the same time , protecting the privacy of the individual users.

Keyword search can also be a key element in their revenue , with the type of information streaming out constantly from their 9 million users would lead to a very profitable customer insight database to be sold to firms.

E.g. If a media agency is able to understand that people belonging to a particular city , say New York, are more inclined to watching TV at a given hour(from their Twitter updates) , this can lead to better media planning and hence increased network ratings for that corresponding channel

Twitter also plans to develop tools that brands and companies can use to drive research and engage consumers. These brands can create premium and paid “Twitter” pages that contains exclusive information on the latest releases, news and articles about them, and also offers special discounts to their “followers”

Future of Twitter

With a simple one line concept of “What you are doing ” Twitter has certainly turned some heads and on an expansion spree. The success of it lies in its simplicity and the timeframe of the message it tries to convey (similar to Digg – Digg ur fav posts , Facebook – A place to network with friends and relatives , LinkedIn – a place to network with possible recruiters etc)
It is also touted to be the 2009 Top technology trend of the year.

Despite all the media frenzy surrounding it , the future of Twitter is still uncertain , where some users believe it will either die a eventual death after a brief stint or it will get taken over by some corporate giant like Microsoft or Google
Rumors has it , that talks are already been taking place , for a complete buyout by Google in the near future.
Will it be called Twoogle then ?

Catch me on Twitter at :http://twitter.com/hkmurali