Three Monetization Strategies For Twitter

The more I become addicted to Twitter and to its powerful effects to my business, the more I try to figure out how twitter could monetize the enormous amount of data they collect every day.

The cool side of this story is that Twitter could potentially share revenues with their users, as Google does. Twitter users could be easily seen as publishers and the more followers they get the more ad messages could be seen by other users.

All that said, here are three possible easy methods Twitter could adopt to monetize its service.

Google Adsense

Yes, the big G. An agreement with Google could be worthwile, IMHO. Think of an “adsense Tweet” in the middle of each user’s stream. The philosophy is: Twitter users publish content, Twitter adds contextual ads to their stream that could be potentially relevant for their followers. Then users could receive a percentage of the revenues coming from their followers. At that point Google would acquire Twitter immediately.

Featured User/Company

In this case, Twitter could send special “ad tweets” from selected companies in the middle of each user’s stream. Again, those tweets should be relevant to what users are interested in and try to catch users’ attention in some ways.

Ad on User Profiles

I bet you don’t use the web version of Twitter that much, except when it comes to see who has just started following you. In that case you pay attention to your new follower’s profile and there you would find an Ad. Looks like this is not that far from reality since Twitter’s been experimenting something like this in the last couple of days (now featuring Twitter search in the example below)

In all the three cases described above, there are two important parameters to evaluate the effectiveness of the ads: click-to-rate and the level of relevance. I experienced directly how useless could be an ad if people don’t pay attention to it.

A few weeks ago I published an ad on Facebook. My target were people over 23 in the US. The result? Over 100.000 impressions and 5 clicks… Well, it’s been cheap, but far from being effective!

What do you think? What strategy will Twitter adopt to monetize their service? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

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Tagged as: AdSense, facebook, Google, luca filigheddu, On the Web, Online Communities, Publishing, Social network, Twitter