Twitter business models: mobile advertising

by: Bena Roberts Tuesday, October 9th, 2007

Rating: twit, twit, twit to replace tweet tweet tweet

I saw a blog on moconews about two different schools of thought on Twitter. How will it make money and how will advertising fit in.

It set my brain working. Apparently the existing schools of thought are that Twitter will add advertisement on the rear end of Twitter messages when they are sent on mobile. This is already a possibility on mobile devices and I have seen this from mobile operators in the past.

The only dilemma is the privacy of taking SMS messaging – decoding keywords and triggering messages. But in this day and age when your Twitter account is owned by Twitter and your Facebook account owned by Facebook…. Anything is possible.

So with my BKI Media Analysis 2.0 hat on- what do I think scalable business models for Twitter are.

Indeed, advertising is the key but in the suggestions above relying on using up character space (if the message is shorter than the character count) is a bit wishy washy. To make advertising a success and to create an environment where products and services are scalable and investment targets are reached – mobile advertisements need to be part of every mobile Twitter message and not just the odd few.

So how? I thought about this and had a cup of tea… then it hit me. Instead of adding more text to the Twitter message – its more likely that Twitter could use advertising to its advantage by adding a micro-code or tag coupon. This way special offers (from advertisers) can be sent globally from any location to any set of receivers based on the profile of the user not only the premise of the message. Because messages can be sporadic or not always relevant..

Now that would make very strong business sense.