Twitter is taking off. We all acknowledge that. And people are really starting to use it in very interesting ways. I read an article in the Guide in the Saturday Guardian about the fact that the characters from Mad Men were appearing all over Twitter. It wasn’t in fact a very clever marketing campaign by the makers of the show, it was fans of the show taking on the guise of Don Draper and Peggy Olsen et al, bringing the characters into the ‘real’ world.
However, there has always been a bit of a niggle – what is the Twitter business model? How are they going to make money – after all, they can’t go on for ever with VC cash. They could do paid-for advertising, either as banner ads or as ad placements within your feed. But users won’t like this, the joy of Twitter is that you have human to human contact (virtually) – people are following the likes of Stephen Fry, Wossy and Fearne Cotton (the list of celebs is getting long now) because they are getting the non-PR’d version of people, a personal dialogue. Likewise, following industry tweeters brings you first hand insights. The minute there is a sniff of placed advertising, people are bound to go a bit cold.
So, it is with interest that I read an article this morning on Brand Republic that Twitter is planning to charge brands for commercial use. I guess this depends on how they model this, how much they charge and how much control they have over the brand’s use of the tool, but this could be an interesting first stab as a revenue generator. Watch this space.
**Less than 24 hours later**
I was catching up on my Twitter feeds just now. Interested to see that there was a new Brand Republic article which outlined this very debate, as a follow on from yesterday’s report. To be honest, nothing revolutionary, but interesting nonetheless. This was posted at 11am this morning (11 Feb). A few tweets further up and lo and behold there is a blog entry that apparently Twitter have decided NOT to charge. Interesting, very very interesting. Let’s see where this goes…
