Twitter: Officially Open For “Real” Business

by megan ~ March 26, 2009

In the three years since its launch, the messaging service Twitter has attracted millions of users, and taken pop culture by storm.  With just 29 employees, it has seen its web traffic grow 900% over the past year as politicians, business leaders, and celebrities have made headlines with their tweets, and web users from around the world have flocked to the service. 

However, until this week, its fast growth had yet to translate into significant revenue.

On Monday, Twitter announced that it’s finally making a foray into online advertising by selling sponsorship of a designated “ExecTweets” site to Microsoft Corp.  Twitter, a relatively young San Francisco-based service that has nonetheless raised at least $55 million in funding and drawn a rapidly growing pool of regular users, announced the advertising initiative on a company web site.

ExecTweets.com seeks to become a revenue generator for Twitter.  The site aggregates tweets, or short bursts of text using Twitter’s online messaging platform, from executives at major U.S. companies and organizations like Coca-Cola Co., Best Buy Co., and the Lance Armstrong Foundation allowing those executives to talk directly to the millions on Twitter.   The move is an answer to critics who have noted that red-hot Twitter hasn’t yet developed a business model to match its popularity.

Twitter users will soon start seeing promotions for ExecTweet on the main Twitter login page, and in the little box that Twitter just started featuring on profile pages.  As advertising goes, this is pretty simple and non-invasive - hard to imagine even Twitter’s most anti-advertising adherents having a big problem with this one.  But it’s also hard to imagine that many people will see the ads at all since the majority of Twitter use happens off the site, on mobile apps like Twitterific for Apple’s iPhone and desktop clients like Tweetdeck.

The original aim of Twitter was to enable micro-blogging and allow users to make inane personal comments about their minute-by-minute activities, as if anyone really wants to know you’re watching The Hills or eating a grilled cheese!

But this new venture now begs the question:  Is ExecTweets the right next step? Will tweeters really care about a mass of people whose only common thread is that they’re “executives?” 

You decide!

Megan Raphael is an account executive at Mediashop Public Relations.  She received a Bachelor of Science degree in Public Relations and International Studies at the University of Miami.