Twitter: A social revolution in the making

Twitter is an interesting and evolving community of users, interacting with each other through its typical ideology of 140 character tweets. It has emerged as a powerful micro-blogging site for people on the move. It is a visionary concept in the social media space devising a unique form of interaction and event based tweeting. No identical competitor demonstrates such typical social interaction, and this empowers it to dictate its own future by shaping its own market, its users and its perception of the huge amounts of data floating in the form of “tweets”. In my opinion, it has created its own specific strategic position by defining its own rules: its set of hash tagged tweets, and its way of facilitating B2B marketing for innumerable short and medium sized enterprises.

Twitter, popularly known as “SMS of the internet”, was founded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey. The service soon went viral, attributing a large user base of over 500 million to its credit, generating over 340 million tweets daily. The market capitalization of the business stands at about $10billion and is speculated to go public by end of 2013. The core ideology of the business is to facilitate user interaction and build strong social networks by associating and interpreting data using innovative and enriching means such as sponsored tweets, news feeds, and interest driven user connections.

It adds an exciting value proposition to the online business marketing campaigns. It helps businesses create a buzz by promoting and diffusing information from any corner of the world to the other. Its evolving ways of doing business through promoted accounts, promoted tweets and trends brings to light the unpredictable and malleable nature of its target market. With the quest to continuously add value to user’s activities on the web, this business has a lot to experiment, discover and absorb.

Users can tweet through Twitter website or Twitter clients and apps for desktops, tablets, or smartphones. The time sensitive data that Twitter deals in through its real time tweets holds a great future value, where smartphones are expected to dominate, and hence would nicely integrate with user tracking, geo-location based services, and a running commentary of user’s life events. A growing part of the Twitter’s strategy is to feed on the power of the mobile technologies and stay closely coupled with them for wider and more intelligent reach.

There is no dearth of social media companies such as Facebook, LinkedIn, AOL, and many more that have carved out a niche for themselves in the intertwined world of users, their connections, trust networks, and circles. For maintaining the privacy and security of the online web, there are rules broadly defining the use and access of this data, termed as “user data protection policy”, which defines the boundaries within which these companies have to operate. Amidst all this, it seems that Twitter’s business model is better designed to adapt to the changing needs of the masses. Its present strategy is driven by the sheer volume of its user base and exponentially rising data exchange between them.

References

Berman, Dennis K. “Is Twitter Really Worth $10 Billion?” Wall Street Journal, February 26, 2013.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323384604578328303487784818.html.

“Twitter Has a Business Model: ‘Promoted Tweets’.” Accessed June 1, 2013. http://adage.com/article/special-report-digital-conference-2010/twitter-a-business-model-promoted-tweets/143237/.

“Understanding Twitter Business Model.” Understanding Business Models. Accessed June 1, 2013. http://bmimatters.com/2012/02/18/understanding-twitter-business-model-design/.