Twitter continues to make waves in the social media marketing realm by reporting record profits – for a site that hasn’t rolled out any advertising. Critics can stop asking how the microblogging service can ever turn a profit because Bloomberg reports a $25 million revenue for the social media marketing platform. Even without advertising, the search deals the social media marketing platform finalized with Google and Microsoft are worth $15 and $10 million, respectively. This isn’t pocket change!
Twitter can’t expect to make such ground-breaking deals every year but it can’t be undervalued for these deals as well. The microblogging site’s influence on our social media marketing needs is growing with each day. Bloomberg’s article even notes that executives of Google and Microsoft both agreed that “their search sites would be considered incomplete if they didn’t include the millions of messages that get posted on Twitter every minute.” So how can the social media marketing site that revolutionized 2009 continue to generate revenues? Especially in an effort to continually roll out new features (i.e. re-tweet, geolocation, and big business tools) –which will involve an increased R&D budget.
Unfortunately for users, an advertisement-free Twitter will see its demise in 2010. Twitter has revealed plans to initialized advertising programs in the coming year and will begin charging for commercial Twitter accounts. The charge for commercial accounts will include a tool for analyzing tweet traffic and possibly other features. However, no matter how they approach the advertising game, Twitter intends on making this transition very “organic” in the sense that they don’t want advertisements to disrupt the way users use the site. Ideally, Twitter will implement advertisements in a subtle manner.
It will be interesting to see how Twitter plans to make this a subtle transition and if users will agree that it is “organic.”
Written by: Daisy K.
