How Twitter Can Effectively Monetize
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Business
It’s the constant subject of bickering on any kind of podcast that includes Leo Laporte. How can Twitter better monetize? Personally, I feel as though there constant collection of money from Capital Investment firms seems to be working fine, but eventually the money faucet is going to be turned off. So, when Mom and Dad stop paying for me to backpack around Europe and go to Graduate School for the third time straight, what do I for money?
Well, this humble individual who happens to be intelligent enough to run his own blog has an idea. Among my following, are my two favorite airliners, JetBlue and Southwest. Just as a side note, they are my two favorites because they are the only ones I’ve flown on where I wasn’t treated as a serious inconvenience to the flight attendants, receptionists, and pilots flying the plane.
Well, these airliners like many other companies consider Twitter as part of their Marketing efforts on the Internet. No, you mean JetBlue really doesn’t just want to be my Twitter friend? Well, I think the people in charge of these accounts have an awful lot of fun doing it. But, here is how both JetBlue and Twitter can start making some serious cash off of this new platform.
Let’s say for example that JetBlue decides to offer a flight from New York JFK to San Francisco for $175 one way for 200 first come, first serve customers. What they can do is announce this offer to their million plus followers on Twitter and the the first 200 who click the link and book the flight at that price will get the deal. JetBlue could easily sell 200 tickets at that price in a manner of seconds over Twitter, netting $35,000 of new revenue. But, it seems to me that Twitter is a middle man in this process, so why not give Twitter a small cut of the funds? If each customer is worth $175 to JetBlue, certainly they can give $1 of that to Twitter, giving Twitter a total of $200.
Now, let’s say that JetBlue offers a similar deal to this every day or so. The next day it could be tickets from Long Beach to Las Vegas for $35, and Twitter nets 25 cents for each ticket they sell. Southwest could offer $25 off any flight over $200 for one day only over Twitter and give Twitter 5% of the sales from that offer. Twitter is being used already as a sales platform and it seems that Twitter deserves a small cut for providing this service to these companies.
It doesn’t have to be complicated, Twitter just needs to work with the many companies on Twitter to see if they are interested. It would be better than these companies having to pay a fee for their account because the company would have to be making sales before Twitter got any money. The technology to do these sorts of offers is already their and can be very beneficial for Twitter, the companies, and the people taking advantage of the offers from companies they are following.
Followers will love this, it will allow them to get good deals not available to the casual customer. “I like your company so much that I follow it on Twitter, and I deserve good deals!” I don’t think that’s too much to ask, do you?
One Response to “How Twitter Can Effectively Monetize”
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Meggan Mills Says:
October 3rd, 2009 at 13:23Thanks for the article – I just joined Twitter so this is great to know!