Twitter does have a way out

First of all, I want to commend Neal Wiser (@nealwiser) on the well-thought analysis in his article, Twipocalypse Now: Warnings of a Twitter Bubble.  He builds a very solid argument of the fiscal instability that could appear as a ripple effect of this growing phenomenon.  This is a very informative post that got me thinking about the potential for this Social Media giant, as well.

For the most part, I agree with the idea that Twitter could go from a pleasant tweet to a noisy squawk that no one pays attention to if they’re not careful.  There is a delicate balance that they must maintain to keep their current user base happy while they remain enticing to the rest of the world as they try to stop losing money.  That delicate balance may have the odds stacked against them, as many would think.  However, I don’t agree that this is case.

 

Is Twitter doing something wrong?

Everyone’s buzzing about the fact that Twitter is operating without a business model.  ”There’s no revenue stream there” seems to be the biggest thing that people are quick to repeat.  While that may be true for now, I find it hard to believe that Twitter doesn’t have any ideas in mind for how they could begin turning a profit.  If you think about it they’ve definitely got some options.

 

What is Twitter getting out of this?

Exposure.  Take a look at all of the free publicity that they’re getting with all of this.  Twitter is getting an incredible amount of press at no cost to them.  Even if the news reports and speculations are negative, it’s only going to stir up more interest in the public to go and check them out.  GoDaddy.com ended up with the same thing over their Super Bowl ads.  All of the negative attention they were getting ended up driving more traffic to their site and ultimately more sales.  Twitter could end up riding the same kind of wave here.

 

What can Twitter do to improve?

As far as their profitability is concerned, yes, that’s definitely an issue for them to be thinking about.  But I don’t think that they are sitting in such a bad position.  Twitter could ride the tide and glean the rewards of more users from all of this publicity and then come out with a money-maker.  I think they’ve got plenty of options, but the key for them will be to choose them wisely.

Premium Accounts

One of the ways Twitter could earn some cash would be to charge people to be able to use the service.  I’ll be the first to admit that this would deter an awful lot of users, but the idea could have some merit if done properly.  They could offer a free service that limits the number of people you can follow, or the number of tweets you can post in a day.  They could also say that free accounts can’t post hyperlinks.

Paid Advertising

When I go to my Twitter page, I see a clean, neat layout without any annoying ads.  Ahhh.  A nice place to decorate and hang a Twicked-out background and read through my friends’ posts.  Well, This is definitely something Twitter could take advantage of to earn a few bucks.  What if they were to lease some of the header or side column space from your profile for ads?  If you’re a business utilizing Twitter to promote yourself, then you’re going to want to buy up the ads on your own account(s) so that none of your competitors do.  Seems plausible to me.

API Subscriptions

There certainly are a lot of Twitter clients out there, and the list is only growing.  It seems as though you can’t go more than a couple hours without seeing someone post yet another list of “The Top X# of Twitter Apps“.  So, there are plenty of 3rd party apps out there that touch Twitter.  Twitter just needs to find a way to tap into that resource to earn some dough.   They could probably make a pretty fair amount if they would allow more than 100 API calls per hour.  They could say that it’s free up to 100 per hour, but any more than that will cost you.  That in itself could add some benefits to the clients as well because they’re just going to pass the cost along to their customers.

 

It’s not written in stone

The real beauty of all of this is that it’s speculation and we can all just sit back and watch it play out.  So, I wouldn’t count Twitter out of the game – they’ve got plenty of options to work with.

Advertisement