Making money with Twitter: Ending up somewhere else

"If you don't know where you are headed, you'll probably end up somewhere else." -Yogi Berra

Much ado has been made by Twitter-haters about the self-indulgent, ambient-intimacy of posts about latte's, bedtimes and teeth-bushing habits...especially if you aren't Ashton Kuchner or Oprah (who now, like Sting, Bono and some Brazilian soccer stars, requires only one name for recognition).

And while there are obvious insignificancies (?) filling much bandwidth, there is money being generated thru Twitter: Dell, for one, claims to have made more than $3 million from it's Twitter posts (here).

How does that work?

Simply, it works the same way the 1999 Web worked...except you have 140 characters to make it happen:

1. Post information about products, specials, offers and information with a link to online shopping cart.

2. Track referring source for visitor (i.e., where they came from).

3. Analyze completed transaction values against referring sources.

Of course it can be a little more complicated to assess bounce rates, transaction flows, direct + repeat visits, but that's all part of having a plan against objectives...

So What?

Hard goods companies (like Dell or Amazon) have a more direct measure of the money generated from their online presence. But even service enterprises can assign some measure of value to their Twitter feed.

Looking at who has chosen to follow, retweet or otherwise engage a company's twitter feed is not so different than analyzing web metrics associated with blogs, company sites or--dare I say it--direct marketing efforts.

As it turns out, measuring Twitter's value to a company is no different than measuring any other element of a company's marketing communications. Or as Yogi Bear might say: "Boo Boo, if you don't have an objective for your Twitter journey, you'll surely end up somewhere else."

To end up on a few prior posts about metrics and measurement, see here, here, here, or here

To end up the week in Jellystone, check out Yogi Bear: Episode 1