This is complete speculation so bear with me. Very recently, Twitter changed its email alert messages from pithy text-only notices of new followers or direct messages to branded, graphical emails.
Well, Twitter has always been in a conundrum: If they monetize the sparse web interface, they’ll alienate their very touchy early adopters and send people away in disgusted droves; however, if they place banners, contextual ads or sponsored links into alert emails, then no harm, no foul.
I don’t know if you have looked in your settings recently, but there is a lot of opportunity to set up your Twitter account to send you a lot of alerts and warnings, letting you know when you receive a direct message or when you score a new follower — especially if you’re someone like me, adding an additional 200 followers per day!
So, what do you think? Instead of Twitter shopping itself around to Google and Microsoft, maybe Twitter is shopping its inline advertising opportunity within the endless email alerts that it sends me and many of you every hour of every day.
Do you think this is possible or probable? Please let me know in the comments, here or at Marketing Conversation.
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- Twitter Allows Direct Messages From People You Don’t Follow (forbes.com)
Chris Abraham is a partner in Socialmedia.biz. Contact Chris via email, follow him on Twitter and Google Plus or leave a comment below.
I do think that Twitter will bypass traditional kinds of online advertising for new approaches, and this seems like a logical path — in addition to premium services.
Inline email marketing could be very lucrative if they can do it correctly. It's all about relevancy. Ad serves could be pushed from an advertiser pool and targeted based on the most recent tweet topics from that user. If nothing relevant could be pushed based on tweets, then the system could default to identifying advertisers that may appeal to the user based on their profile data. To really kick things in high gear, Twitter could offer revenue sharing on clicks generated by the notifying emails to your followers. I'm not a code poet but I bet it could be done pretty easy.
Inline email marketing could be very lucrative if they can do it correctly. It's all about relevancy. Ad serves could be pushed from an advertiser pool and targeted based on the most recent tweet topics from that user. If nothing relevant could be pushed based on tweets, then the system could default to identifying advertisers that may appeal to the user based on their profile data. To really kick things in high gear, Twitter could offer revenue sharing on clicks generated by the notifying emails to your followers. I'm not a code poet but I bet it could be done pretty easy.