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August 27th, 2009 
QuadsZilla Moving down the list, we had a question about converting twitter traffic. There are certainly more qualified people than me to address this issues, so I will defer – except for a few observations.
When you don’t live in the US, you’re not exposed to US media. One thing that has struck during the trip back here is how much press twitter is getting in all forms of old media.
I can’t remember a time, ever, where a company got their brand inserted so skillfully into so many types of media. For example, the other day I saw a Best Buy commercial on TV. Throughout more than half of the commercial, best buy had their twitter address on the screen. What’s even crazier was that nowhere on the screen was best buys website url!
Then we saw Verizon commercials everywhere that have people talking about how they are using twitter. There was a shot of a father saying that he was tweeting “I’m sitting on the front porch” which is about as interesting as the average tweet. I’m pretty sure I’ve even seen twitter on a billboard for someone else’s product.
Even during facebook’s explosive growth we never saw so much “free” cross brand promotion. Troy Aikman talks about using it for fantasy football; Arnold used it to ask how to close the budget gap (the answer was “legalize and tax it” – obviously). If you check out shoemoney, you see he’s even got a pay per tweet service that’s seems to at least be making some money and everyone seems to want to know how to convert twitter traffic.
So what? Well it’s clear that twitter is getting more traction than I ever thought it could. If I was wrong about that, then it makes sense that I could be wrong about other aspects of twitter potential. Even so, while I’m sure that some people will make money with twitter, my gut still tells me that it’s a fool’s gold rush.
I hope I’m wrong and all you people hunting twitter dogs make a killing. But what do you think? Do you think that as a platform, twitter is going to have the money making potential of the iphone app store, or facebook or even myspace?
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QuadsZilla asks “how 2 make $s on Twitter”. It’s easy once u think about the 140 chr limit. Then big $$$ come. I did it! My secret was that
I have multiple accounts for the sponsored tweets program. About the only thing I like about Twitter! Otherwise, I think it’s just more internet clutter.
Twitter has the potential for conversion, but the profile has to be highly targeted. Many folks, even the sponsored programs use automatic Twitter adds to find friends and that’s how most get 50,000+ followers/following, but if that list is not well maintained for targeting then it most likely will not convert. I’d prefer sponsoring a list of 10,000 follows if the profile is highly targeted and each follow is an actual target lead — whereas the list is pruned periodically and does not just follow non-targeted leads for the sake of increased follows. However, those who actually have such managed profiles most likely do not offer any sponsored programs.
I think twitter is the next myspace.
Cruddy engineering, lots of money spent (sms), no clear revenue path.
However, people will ride twitter until it is eaten by the next big thing ™.
I too am perplexed by how much traction Twitter is getting. For the life of me I fail to grasp how people have time for something as asinine as that. Teens and tweens, sure, but you have adults with full-time jobs and kids and everything tweeting like no tomorrow.
My best guess, this is a flash in the pan and everyone will get bored of it sooner or later: the tamagotchi of web 2.0. I’m probably wrong about this. Some nutter will probably come up with something that’s even more invasive and asinine.