Twitter Is Profitable! Finally!
I don’t know about you but the fact that Twitter is now profitable is a weight off my shoulders. Over the years we’ve seen these companies become a major force for changing the way people communicate. So, what if Twitter were to go under, wouldn’t that alter the lives of many. You bet it would! It would alter the lives of around 58 million people. That’s the number of people who have a presence on Twitter. Let’s say only half of those people are active, that’s still over 25 million. You just can’t buy that many impressions within a reasonable marketing and advertising budget.
You can go the Business Week article to read the announcement for yourself but briefly, it says:
1. Twitter inked a multi-year deal with Google and Microsoft that is worth around $25 million
2. The deal makes tweets available to show up in searches on Google and Bing
3. This deal confirms that Twitter is a valuable entity and will be around for a while
4. Tweets will make searches even more content rich with up to the minute information from real people
The good news is that if you are using Twitter as a marketing tool your tweets might show up in Google more frequently than your website. I’m not a web analyst or anything but it seems to me that if a few thousand people are tweeting about you then that might show up in searches faster than if you are blogging or have a website. Are there any Google experts out there who can give us some insight on how tweets might be indexed?
My biggest question right now is what will happen to sites like search.twitter.com. I always advise my clients to use this type of site to search tweets. If you can search in Google and get a multi-layered result, why go through the extra trouble of having searches on other sites. It seems redundant.
The other problem that I see for business is this whole big brother (meaning customers) is really watching now. Who doesn’t use Google? Now, current customers and potential new customers might find out in real time what people think about your business. Moreover, what about people looking for jobs? Already, HR recruiters might look at Facebook or MySpace to determine if they want to hire a person. Will your tweets now be easy to obtain by recruiters just by doing a Google search?
What do you think? Could this be the best deal of the century? Or, will it be a huge headache for marketers and advertisers?
