I read an interesting blog post today from Senior writer at Fortune magazine Adam Lashinsky’s Go West Blog. His post, titled “Will Twitter Make It?” gave me a lot of food for thought. Adam is addressing the question many of us are curious about when it comes to Twitter’s business model. Adam is also asking the question why should he and other business people use Twitter.

I myself have had a Twitter account for almost a year now but never used it because I, like Adam couldn’t see why business people would frequent this micro blogging service. I also had to fight the misconception that Twitter was only for those with SMS mobile devices. I fought the urge to Tweet long and hard until my good friend and Social CRM Expert Brent Leary told me how blogs like Mahalo drove major traffic to their website using Twitter.

Driving traffic to my website and blog was something I was definitely interested in doing. I then renewed my Twitter account and have been Tweeting both from my computer using the Twitter application, TweetDeck and with my cell phone using Jott, the voice recognition service. Marketing my business, my blog and myself through Twitter, or “Twarketing” has now been added as a focal point to my current business strategy.

I now have my Tweets show up on my blog using Twitter Tools. I automatically respond to followers and schedule future Tweets with Tweetlater. I even track the links in my Tweets using Tweetburner. Last but not least I do market research on products and services using Summize, which was just purchased recently by Twitter.

I believe that Twarketing will eventually drive those of the more mainstream to become users of Twitter. Early adopters like Maggie Mason who was the 448th person to sign up for Twitter, according to Twitterholic, are already seeing the fruits of their labors. Maggie currently has 6,458 follows and has parlayed those followers into traffic to her MightyGoods blog. Mighty Goods is a shopping blog and one of Time Magazine’s Top 50 Cool Sites of the year.

Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama holds the number two position on Twitterholic with 56,183 followers. The Blog Barack20 credits Twitter as one of the many social media networks that helped Mr. Obama win the Democratic nomination for President.

I believe Twitter will make it. I believe Twitter will develop a profitable business model. I also believe I have an idea of how Twitter can use a current advertising model for one of their revenue streams.

I will look to share that in a future post.

Brent Leary, I think you may have created a Twonster..;-)

All the best

JB

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Tags: Adam Lashinsky, Barack20, Brent Leary, Maggie Mason, Mahalo, MightyGoods, Twarketing, Tweetburner, TweetDeck, Tweetlater, Twitter, Twitter Tools, Twitterholic

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 5:37 pm and is filed under Free Web 2.0, Social Marketing, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.