Once it would have been unimaginable to earn an income solely from blogging, but people like Jason Kottke decided to. The latest form of media, one which is becoming increasingly respected, is micro-blogging (especially Twitter) so why is it that we have not seen swarms of full-time Twitterers?
Twitter is a social networking site, so its primary aim is to allow people to stay in contact with one another. This contrasts with blogging, which although is often social is more often or not commentary, advice or Hollywood gossip! The consequence is many Internet personalities use sites like Twitter to complement their other, revenue-generating online activities.
Before we ask if it’s possible to be a full-time Twitterer, we must ask if it’s possible to monetise it. Advertising on the blogosphere has used a wide-range of techniques: text links, contextual adverts, affiliate schemes in addition to more conventional approaches like banners. On Twitter, it’s more limited. Adverts can’t be contextual based on content, as posts are too short to have any ‘real’ content; text links cannot be built into posts as the site doesn’t support HTML and the 160 character limit makes it impractical to add links to tweets; and statistics aren’t provided to the user, so things can’t be charged on a CPM basis.
Sites like Be-A-Magpie suggest Twitter, does, however have the potential to be monetised, albeit at the expense of the followers. Scobles, according to Be-A-Magpie, could earn €22,657 a month. The problem is, followers would dismiss advertisement tweets and I imagine not many advertisers would be willing to make such a gamble.
Perhaps an effective way of monetising Twitter is through affiliate marketing. If popular Twitters suggest a product they like, and link to it with their affiliate ID, I’m sure they could collect a handsome commission.
Companies would also be unwilling to employ full-time Twitterers, as they’d have too much spare time (a Tweet takes but a few seconds to compose). Downing Street’s Twitterer is also responsible for their other social networking activities and I suspect much of our Prime Minister’s website.
Is full time Tweeting possible? Not until tweets become more useful than ‘I’m flying coach with a baby. I +wish+ I was in first class, but have used up all my miles. Sighs.‘ (and that somehow entertains Scoble’s 43000 followers!). Frankly, it isn’t possible to monetise tweets effectively as of yet.
I think popular Twitterers would not want to denigrate their brand name and possibly alienate their followers by having tweets are affiliate links. Eventually, people will stop following them I suspect.
Your point about companies hiring p/t Twitterers, however, makes sense.
[...] Joe Anderson raised an interesting question recently about whether someone could Twitter for a living. [...]
[...] happened to read Joe Anderson’s post Is it possible to be a full-time Twitterer? at about the same time as this was percolating away on the back-burner. Joe focused on advertising [...]
Interesting, but I think the answer is no. It is social media. The purpose is entirely different and inherently less flexible than a blog.
[...] Is it possible to be a full-time Twitterer? – Webby’s World [...]
Currently I see possibility in the affiliate realm in making money with Twitter. Advertising hasn’t really taken off. Twitter monetization probably works best when you have a product to sell which you can bring to your Twitter followers (such as Dell has done recently).
Matt
Twitter is an amazing tool, for allowing you to connect with others not for advertising
Twitter is a much more finely balanced affair than many other social media services. The amount of activity from one user has to be very carefully attenuated so as not to irritate followers. I’m sure we’ve all been in the position of opening up our Twitter channel and seeing it flooded by a single tweet-happy user, and then unfollowing that user.
Any kind of rev model that is based on volume (which everything is to some extent) is likely to fail on Twitter