Business Model: Twitter as a Name Registrar
Twitter is the fastest-growing social community, according to the latest Nielsen statistics. The unique audience is reaching 2.4 million with visitors almost at 5.6 million, according to ComScore.
Still, it’s not mainstream. Yet, in the current economic downturn, finding the right revenue model is becoming more important than ever.
Ads and… ?
The company wants to add ads. Ads in social network have proven a biggest challenge than on usual
websites, for the consumer has all its attention focused to its own world, his “friends”. Ads on the side and in the search engine can be quickly added, but that won’t certainly be enough to become profitable.
Adding ads directly in the blog stream could work to a level, but this wouldn’t be very welcome by the current tech-savvy users.
Twitter knows that and decided to go for yet another round of capital: it recently raised USD 22 million, according to Bloomberg. It will let the company attract more and more users and magnet them to the service before making other choices.
Targeted ads
Japan is used as a sandbox for an experiment, Twitter groups.
While most power-users have to rely on tools like TweetDeck to sort through their followed tweets, Twicco.jp promises to channel those at the source. ROI on group ads would clearly be higher and I think the company has decide quick on how to implement groups worldwide.
Premium services
According to a recent -albeit very unscientific- poll, about half of the Twitter users would be ready to pay for some premium services. This is good news.
Micro-charging users to use the service is a first idea that comes to mind. Then again, the Twitter wanna-be’s are there. Paying to turn ads off could also work, as getting a pro account with more customization: profile features, domain name mapping.
The company could even think about a usage cap for free users: numbers of following/followers, tweets per day.
Branding Twitter, branded tweets
Since brands are interested in the micro-blogging tool, domain name mapping could be a clever premium idea. The other ? Charge companies for their use of Twitter as a help/support or viral marketing, by sharing revenue on promotions or allowing profile targeted search. Allow for various user interface at a price is also possible.
But why not the following idea?
Twitter could act as a registrar and charge for brand names.
If GAP wants the “gap” username, register it. On branded.twitter.com for instance.
It’s late to say that. Twitter will have to fight. They should think about it, even if that means creating another domain name just for brands and find a way to include these in the current users’ stream.
It’s clearly also valid for other social micro-blogging services, but as the leader, Twitter should act fast.
Integrating the corporation
Further down the road, Twitter should also take a look at what Yammer does. Integrating a Twitter-like tool for intranets should be explored. A participative announcement feed? Yes, maybe. An advanced IM tool? Yes of course.
Having the ability to register a chat in a tool without having to predefine groups is very interesting. If the ability to create channels was also there, the team working or multi-channel chatter advantages
are evident.
That’s of course, if Twitter doesn’t marry with Facebook. But that’s another story.
