How can Twitter make money?

With celebrity endorsements and the traditional media raving about it, in the past 6 months Twitter has exploded on to the main stream. So much so that according to compete.com, with nearly 55m visits a month, Twitter is now the 3rd most visited social network in the world.

However, they don’t actually make any money from the business! And this is starting to lead to questions about whether the site’s success is worth the financial investment if there is no return.  One theory is the business exists simply to be bought by the likes on Google or Microsoft who can afford to run services such as these at a loss with the data they gather worth the outlay.

However, if I was the owner and wanted to start rolling around on a bed of crisp £50 notes I would look at the following…

Advertising:
Contextual advertising
Here I would pick out keywords and phrases being used by members in their (and their friend’s) tweets and then display adverts associated with those themes. For example if you are discussing the latest Nike trainers, a sports retailer magically appears with a great offer on trainers.

These targeted adverts could either sit within the feed so they are integrated with other tweets (although clearly marked as an advert) or as display advertising on the profile page. Google uses this method on Gmail to display their adverts.

Self service PPC network
In exactly the same vain as the search engine’s pay per click auction model advertisers would bid on keywords and phrases to have their adverts shown and only pay if someone follows the link.

Charge for the service:
Volume tweets
The commercial email platform’s charge customers based on the number of emails sent out per month. Twitter should do exactly the same through monthly credits for businesses.

Two tier membership
Don’t want to be shown my adverts? Then pay me! A lot of services now offer a two tier model, with free users being shown adverts and those who want to avoid them (along with access to some snazzy features the free users don’t get) paying an annual subscription fee.

Monetise the data:
Charge big business for access to data
The sheer volume of information passing through Twitter everyday will be enormous. Providing companies and agencies with data about what is being talked about could be a gold mine.

Jerry’s final thought
Obviously the counter argument to all this is all these adverts will put people off using the service, but unless they started putting adverts everywhere I don’t believe this would be the case. I currently use ‘Twitterific’ on my iPhone and they have monetised the application by showing me a graphical advert every 20 tweets or so. They have been thought out and are not obtrusive so I’ll put up with them if it means a free service.

99p business class, award winning webhosting at http://www.instahost.co.uk

Increase your ROI with negative keywords

---

25% all of searches are totally brand new
If you advertise through search engine pay per click and use nothing but exact matches you will be running a very tight ship but you will also be missing out on a lot of potential (and relevant) traffic from keywords you haven’t thought of. With 25% of all searches thought to be completely unique (i.e. they have never been used by anyone ever before) you can’t possibly cover every single search term as an exact match.

Spending time to build up your negative keyword list will:

• Save you a lot of money!
• Increase your click through rate
• Increase your quality scores
• Increase your ROI

Use a combination of match types
On the other side, if you use broad match and phrase match keywords you run the risk of seeing your advert triggered alongside a keyword that isn’t actually related to your site. For example, if you bid on ‘web banner design’ as a phrase match you would also be shown for ‘FREE web banner design’. Common sense may suggest you change it to an exact match but you would then miss out on ‘GOOD QUALITY web banner design’ etc. Negative keywords act to prevent this from happening and don’t be surprised to find your negative keyword list is much larger than your keyword list (for one of our campaigns we have just under 400 negative keywords).

Finding your negative keywords
When it comes to finding your negative keywords the first step is to think of the situations you don’t want to have your advert shown with:

• You don’t offer that service e.g. ‘Free’
• You don’t want your advert to be associated with that keyword e.g. ‘porn’
• You don’t want to be shown at the research stage of the buying cycle e.g. ‘reviews’
• You don’t trade in that region e.g. ‘Sheffield’
• Etc.

A lot will come from common sense and your own industry experience. For example, amongst our own no brainers were ‘free’, ‘sex’ and ‘adult’. But don’t just stop there. Others will be less obvious (and some positively bizarre) and require you to use keyword research tools.

Google’s keyword tool
From within your AdWords account simply run the report using your most generic keywords (e.g. ours would be ‘web hosting’ etc) and from the list it generates pick out those you do not want to be shown for and add them as a negative keyword (e.g. ‘adult web hosting’).

Microsoft’s keyword mutation
It may sound like a zombie version of one of their products but it is in fact a really useful tool which shows you common misspellings and pluralisation of keywords. For example the keyword “Messenger” comes back with 35 different ways people spell it including ones you couldn’t guess at (e.g. “messemger”).

Microsoft’s keyword group detection
Another nifty tool from Microsoft. This one shows keywords that are related or similar to your keyword. For example “web hosting” brings back results for “dedicated hosting”, “domain hosting”, “isp” and “conference calling”.

Google analytics (GA)
One of the reports with GA shows you the searches used to find your web site. You can split these out in to ‘paid’ and ‘non-paid’. Scrawl through the ‘paid’ list and pick out any keywords you spot you don’t like the look of.

Google suggest
A recent graduate of their labs, this nifty tool offers search suggestions for you to choose from. From this list you can jot down some more negative keyword ideas. Follow these instructions to turn on Google suggest (currently only enabled on google.com and not google.co.uk).

INSTA Host on Twitter

We have joined the web 2.0 (or is it 3.0 now? I’m not sure) social media revolution and you can now follow us on Twitter

To avoid becoming spam, we have given ourselves some guidelines you can expect us to follow…

What we will tweet about:

• Links to useful 3rd party research, tools and resources
• Twitter exclusive competitions
• Blog update alerts
• Twitter exclusive promo codes
• Updates on new product features that benefit you

What we won’t tweet about:

• Updates on the weather
• What we had for lunch
• Links to our corporate press releases
• Our weekend plans (unless they are particularly awesome)

Follow us: http://twitter.com/instahost_co_uk