clare siobhan

This week, Twitter somewhat quietly launched it’s @EarlyBird account which remains private for the moment.
@EarlyBird is an account designed to reward Twitter users that sign in first thing in the morning with offers and discounts from brands and companies.

It follows suit of other recent money-making schemes from Twitter, such as promoted tweets and sponsored trends, as it seems likely that companies that want their offers tweeted to ‘Early Birds’ will probably need to pay (or maybe be offered them as part of a package with the other paid for services).

Though it might not be as successful as promoted tweets and trends have been for companies like Coca Cola and Disney Pixar, it does show that Twitter have become more aware of the different avenues they can take to generate revenue from their popular creation .

When I attended the seminar held by @raffi he noted that one of the things to think about in the future was how to make money from Twitter whilst keeping it as an open resource for developers and not ‘selling out’ and becoming a ‘big bad marketing tool’.

Now it seems likely that there were already many ideas already in development! I’m glad the Twitter creators have found ways to get some return on their useful site, but there is always the issue of ‘will Twitter just become completely for brands with too much of the site being taken up on paid-for advertising.

The other issue I have with accounts like @EarlyBird is that it is likely it will just service the US Twitters and forget about the fans over in the UK. It would be hard to try to market the same promotion to several countries and the prices all vary (especially if you’re in the UK and every gadget seems to be really overpriced compared to those lucky guys over the pond!)

I think only time will tell the success when the account goes live, maybe later on this week or next. Here’s hoping there’ll be some good offers for those of us that log in when they check into their offices at 8:30am!