There's no point in bellyaching over Twitter's model. The path to monetization may not be clear for the company itself right now, but it's clearly working for Twitter's corporate users.
In a press release issued this morning, Dell (Nasdaq: DELL ) claims it has sold $3 million worth of gear through Twitter since it set up camp on the microblogging site two years ago, with a third of that amount coming during the past six months. That's a healthy jump from the $500,000 in refurbished computers that Dell was bragging about selling through Twitter.com tweets back in November.
Meanwhile, coaster fans were flocking to the Six Flags (OTC BB: SIXF.OB) Twitter account yesterday, as the regional amusement-park operator offered $10 admissions to its Twitter followers for a few hours. After the link was posted on enthusiast sites including CoasterBuzz.com, "server capacity issues" overheated the chain's online ordering page. The end result is that Six Flags gained thousands of new followers -- a brilliant move -- and is promising "another chance" at the marked-down turnstile clicks.
Think that sounds cool? Well, Six Flags is a relative slacker compared to Holiday World. The Indiana-based amusement-park operator is a Twitter-holic. All told, it has treated its followers to 2,150 updates through Twitter, offering everything from operating anecdotes to new attraction teases to heads-up alerts on ticket giveaways and promotions.
Maybe we're starting to see why Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN ) CEO Jeff Bezos invested $15 million in Twitter last summer. The e-commerce king saw the transaction-tickling potential of the simplistic text-messaging platform before the rest of us did.
Twitter is also working on both a national and a local level. A USA Today article this week on the art of Twittering points out that a bakery cleverly promoted Cinco de Mayo by offering a free cupcake to the first person to say "Hola!" at its store. A Loic Le Meur blog entry earlier this month listed nearly a dozen San Francisco food-cart operators who are using Twitter to update hungry followers on their daily whereabouts.
Whether or not Google (Nasdaq: GOOG ) was ever serious about its rumored appetite for Twitter, it's easy to see the attraction. Twitter has become both a gateway to e-commerce and to hyperlocal search. Niche specialists such as Local.com (Nasdaq: LOCM ) and the ZIP code domain-blessed Marchex (Nasdaq: MCHX ) made early inroads into reaching searchers at the local level, but Twitter is making the process interactive, empowering, and far more engaging than one would ever expect from a platform that forces you to belt out your message in 140 characters or less.
Big things are happening with small sentences.
Some other cool tricks for tweets:
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