Video: John Batelle and Evan Williams Talk About Twitter’s Business Model
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Federated media founder John Batelle interviewd Twitter co-founder Evan Williams at the Conversational Marketing Summit (via J D Lasica) –
Here are the top sound bytes from the interview –
- The unique visitors at http://www.twitter.com are much higher than the 2.2 million reported by Quantcast and the 3 million reported by Compete. Only 50% of the updates are created on http://www.twitter.com
- Marketers love Twitter because it is unique in combining one-to-many with real-time. Many use it for marketing; Dell sold $500,000 worth of products through Twitter last year. Many, like Comcast, use it for customer service, often through Twitter Search.
- Many think of Twitter as a social network, but the one-way nature of relationship is an important distinction.
- Twitter will consider charging brands to use additional functionalities, like verification of branded Twitter accounts.
- http://www.election.twitter.com was the first experiment in Twitter positioning themselves as a media company, by curating conversations around an event or topic.
- Twitter sees its application partners as a growth opportunity as of now, but may consider working with them if their entire business model is based on the Twitterstream.
- Twitter may consider search ads, but would like to focus on revenue streams that are organic to Twitter’s model of opting in to live content, like sponsored tweets enabling discovery of branded Twitter accounts.
- Twitter has not integrated Twitter Search on the homepage because of concerns about infrastructure (remember the fail whale?) So far, traffic from Twitter Search has mostly come from application partners.
- Twitter’s biggest priority right now is to tweak the user interface to enable easier navigation and discovey to increase its reach beyond the early adopters.
- Twitter doesn’t have firm demographic data, but based on anecdotal evidence, the average Twitter user is older than the average Facebook user and less than half the users are in the United States.
- Twitter is working with news organizations to use it as a tool for breaking news, especially in fast developing crisis situations. Twitter trends is one way to highlight such dvelopments.
- Twitter and Facebook status are technically similar, but the actual use tends to be different, as Twitter is primarily one-way while Facebook is two-way.
- Twitter doesn’t like the idea of a freemium model because it restricts its overall value and diverts too many engineering resources from focusing on growth.
- The biggest challenge for marketers is how to go beyond the campaign mentality and engage in scaled conversational marketing with millions of followers.