It’s safe to say, probably everyone who reads this blog post uses twitter. The question surrounding the company is, how does twitter make its money? Having grown exponentially in the past couple of years, revenue has rose “from just $28m in 2010 to $317m by the end of 2012.” and is forecasted to increase by more than 100% by the end of this year.
“On Thursday, Twitter announced that it wanted to raise $1bn (£619m) by listing on the US stock markets” This is the biggest initial public offering (IPO) since Facebook in 2012. One issue that surrounded Facebook, that Twitter has successfully overcome, was integration of advertising. Twitters approach at “native” advertising subtly places small advertisements related to trending topics in the timeline of its users. Companies can pay to ‘promote’ tweets and push information about themselves into the feeds of the public.
Twitter also uses ‘Firehose’. A tactic to gain money by selling their data to the public (around 500 million tweets a day) that companies can look into and find out what the public is talking about. By doing so, the advertisements that are later ‘promoted’ are suited to the trending topics recently tweeted. This contrasts the seemingly scattered approach from Facebook that landed users with advertisements that seemed random and/or out of context.
Successful advertising and listing on the US stock markets are twitters “Cashtag” to profits.