How Twitter Makes Money
A year ago, people didn’t think Twitter would be making a boatload of money from promotions, advertising campaigns, and organic user interests. Boy, were they wrong! Twitter has over 800 employees, 500 of them were added this year. If that’s not impressive enough, their sales force has grown from 0 to 100 ad sales reps in the last eighteen months. Twitter has over 2,400 advertisers and 1,600 of those were added this spring. Wow! Advertisers are embracing the platform that provides incredible connectivity and engagement which leads to incredible outcomes. Marketers are seeing Twitter in the media mix as something that supports other pieces and use the following tools to keep their consumers interested, engaged, and informed:
- Promoted Tweets – search on a hashtag (#) or term
- Promoted Trends – an idea that introduces consumer trends
- Promoted Accounts – an effective way of driving followers to an account
Promoted tweets and accounts are a bided marketplace or auction for marketers, targeting keywords or interests. Promoted trends are used to take over the market and marketers tell Twitter, “I want to buy space on this date and time,” and those slots are reserved up to six months in advance. Marketers know what the bill will be for a piece of the product pie and the return on investment they’re seeing through the platform is insane. Every single marketer in the world is a performance advertiser. What they measure is either really close to their purchase or really far away. They ultimately know what it leads to in terms of people making purchases and ends up being a big sale to big advertisers. The return rates for marketers is the #1 sign this is working and why people come back and buy from Twitter again and again. That my friends is how Twitter stacks chips!
