Dell makes $3 million from tweets – Twitter makes zero in return
By Dave Parrack
Twitter continues to expand in popularity but also continues to lack any kind of revenue-generating business plan. At least for Twitter itself. Other companies are doing very well from Twitter, including Dell which has just announced it has made $3 million directly from the site. Shouldn’t Twitter be getting a piece of this action?
Twitter is many things – addictive, popular, enlightening, social – but the one thing it isn’t as yet is profitable. Twitter has only just begun looking at ways to monetize the site, and even these are few and far between at the moment. This despite the service being at the height of its popularity and having companies use it extensively for marketing.
One of the biggest companies to use Twitter in this way is Dell, the PC manufacturer. Dell told Reuters that it has now racked up $3 million in sales directly from tweets on the site in the two years since its been using it. One million dollars of this figure came in just the last six months as the popularity of the site exploded thanks to Oprah, Ashton Kutcher, and unending press coverage.
Of course, $3 million isn’t much for a company the size of Dell which posted $12.3 billion of revenue in the first quarter of 2009, but it still shows the power of Twitter. These sales were as a result of people directly clicking on links in Dell tweets and then making a purchase on the Dell Web site, but who knows how many of the other 624,000 followers Dell has were influenced by Twitter and bought later as a result.
Twitter has made absolutely zero out of this, which seems not only wrong but also a missed opportunity on its part. Dell is not alone in having a corporate account on Twitter, and is unlikely to be the only one to have made serious revenue from the site. So it would seem to be ludicrous for Twitter not to charge these companies in some way for providing the means to reach so many customers.
How Twitter does that without scaring companies off is a tough one. The company has floated the idea of charging for commercial accounts but nothing has yet been put into motion. Maybe charging a flat rate for every follower would be a solution, or a percentage of the total sales made as a direct result of tweets?
Whatever route Twitter decides to take, it should act fast before it loses any more chances to make some serious, bankable money.
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