Where’s The Money In Twitter?
There have been a lot of people working in digital media asking this question recently. Many of them, this author included, have probably been caught by an eagle-eyed CEO quietly tweeting away their working hours and found themselves struggling to explain exactly why they are doing it. It’s a difficult question to answer for the simple reason that at the moment we’re not really sure where the money is. We spend our days refreshing our feeds and producing new and interesting Tweets because we believe the money will surely be there eventually, right?
Well the latest signs are that things are beginning to change. Google made it big by realizing where the value was in search and now Twitter can do the same. The difference being that the information that Twitter produces might not always be the most relevant, but it can show you what people the world over are talking about and it can do it in real time.
And promisingly there are companies already beginning to exploit this information, such as 48ers.com for example. This is one of the fastest growing social search engines; type in your search query and 48ers will trawl the big social networking sites for conversations relevant to your search and then present the results straight back to you. As it happens I’m planning on going to see Salt this evening so did a quick search to see what the world thought about it (see picture above). Make a special note of the Google Ads on the right hand side of the search results. If Google can see the potential in the growth of social search then all advertisers should be interested too.
So next time somebody questions the value of your contributions to social media you can tell them this: right now there might be little measurable value in social media and especially so from Twitter. But the game is changing. And we haven’t even mentioned Promoted Tweets...
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