4.27.2009

Monetize with Twitter

Twitter has become the newest tool for staying in touch with friends or creating a following. We have even seen the battle to 1 million followers between Ashton Kutcher and CNN. Twitter is poised to become the largest social network available. But, can you use Twitter to increase your income. Steve Poland founder of inseconds recently wrote Make Money With Twitter! 5 Monetization Models. Steve Poland shows some ways that you can monetize with Twitter.

Build a Following
Probably the most important step is to build a following. It does not matter how many ads you send out if no one is reading them. Steve suggests a following begins with your username. Steve Poland states "Have a Twitter username for “Knicks” (i.e. NY Knicks, a basketball team in the NBA). People add that user as their friend — the “Knicks” username pushes out any Knicks news… the minute it happens! Ditto on sports scores — if a Knicks game is going on, it’ll send out the score during the game to keep you alerted, if you want to be. If you can get 10,000 Knicks fans on your list." Once you have a following then you can begin to monetize.

Embed Ads into Your Messages
An easy way to monetize with Twitter is to embed links to ads at the end of your messages. For instance, if your message is about the basketball game score then you could offer a link to the shows worn by the team's star player. If the ad is relevant to the posting then you are less likely to turn off your audience and your audience is more likely to purchase.

Mix Ad Messages in With Regular Posts
Steve Poland talks about dedicating every 10th, 15th, etc. posting to an ad. For instance, with our Knicks Twitter account. The first 10 postings of the day would be about the upcoming game, team news, etc. but the 11th posting would be an ad. This trend would continue with the 21st posting, etc. This way is a little less transparent than embedding messages but does allow you to dedicate full postings to ads.

Charge to Read Your Postings
Steve Poland talks about using your Twitter account to develop a subscription based service. You would charge Twitter users to be your friend and receive your postings. Steve states "Thus, a celebrity could charge for this — or a newspaper might do this to give you access to the news first — or some blogger that finds online shopping deals could send them to you … basically, if the user wanted to be “in the know” for whatever offering, they’d pay $X for access (per week or month)." Personally, this is my least favorite method because you would have to have a following that was willing to pay for your posts, spend money to create a following, and spend money to set up the back end to verify and check subscriptions.

These are just a few ways to monetize with Twitter. There are also many tools available to help you increase your income with your Twitter account. Here are a few of the resources I found:


No matter what method you use or create to monetize your Twitter account, it is obvious that Twitter has become a movement for the future. We will still have sites like Facebook and MySpace. Twitter will not completely push them out but Twitter does offer people a way to get news from their friends without logging into a larger site.

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