Business, Featured - Written Friday, August 14, 2009 by Laura M. Carrillo - 4 Comments

Monetizing Twitter – Will other companies beat Twitter at its own game?

Given all of the press about monetizing Web 2.0 tools like micro-blogging site Twitter, I thought it would be interesting to investigate a couple companies that are using Twitter’s own platform to develop businesses with models in place to monetize their offerings and possibly turn a profit before Twitter itself does. When is Twitter going to figure this out? Per the “about us” section of the Twitter site: “Twitter has many appealing opportunities for generating revenue but we are holding off on implementation for now…While our business model is in a research phase, we spend more money than we make” I understand taking the time to develop a great service and customer experience, but at some point you need to implement a model for making money. We are a society built on Capitalism, right? Below are two examples of companies based off the Twitter platform and structured to bring in real revenue.

CoTweet is a platform designed specifically to help businesses use Twitter. It lets multiple individuals at one company send tweets on up to six corporate Twitter accounts and keeps the messages in sync across all of the accounts. Per its website, CoTweet is “How Business Does Twitter”. I spoke with the Co-Founder and CEO of CoTweet, Jesse Engle, @jesseengle earlier this week. Per Engle, “CoTweet’s underlying value proposition is to help companies engage in authentic two-way communication and to focus on that engagement.” Illustrating that point, CoTweet offers the ability to view conversation histories allowing you to view your team’s responses in context so you can see which tweets have been responded to and know who’s said what to whom. Engle feels that this is one of the most useful features and is part of what makes CoTweet unique. I personally like the assignment feature which allows you to delegate a task/tweet to someone on your team for follow-up. There are too many other features to include here, but the model is intriguing and already creating a buzz among enterprise customers including @Ford, @Pepsi, @JetBlue and @MSWindows, yep, that’s the Microsoft Windows team. The Twitter API team, @twitterapi even uses CoTweet to manage user requests, and uses CoTweet’s CoTags, a convention for using signatures when tweeting from a company’s brand account.

Still a free service, how will they make money? CoTweet is planning to implement a SaaS model where subscribers pay per month to use the service. Pricing levels and timing are still up in the air, though it’s been reported that this model could be implemented by the end of the year. Also reported in The Wall Street Journal, “Scott Monty, Ford’s digital and multimedia communications manager says that he and a team of nearly a dozen others use CoTweet to manage Ford’s multiple Twitter accounts and would pay for the service when asked to.” A pretty nice endorsement that I’m sure the 6 CoTweet investors liked seeing. Did I mention that CoTweet secured $1.1M in funding last month? Not bad for a company that just launched its public beta site on July 9th.

Another company I came across is StockTwits. This company provides an idea and information sharing service for investors. It’s a very simple concept, you follow @StockTwits and watch or participate in real-time conversations about stocks. The service allows users to see trading activities, conversations about certain stocks as well as view activity about a particular company in one stream. Users tag tweets about specific companies with a $ and the stock sticker symbol. Tweets not about specific companies are tagged with $$. Yesterday I caught up with Co-Founder and CEO of StockTwits, Soren Macbeth, @sorenmacbeth. He mentioned that they have received many testimonials from users who value the opportunity to trade alongside thousands of other traders vs. trading alone. Macbeth believes, “The community is the real value. It’s like a global virtual trading floor for traders.” Continue…