Business
Already Home Depot Inc. has wished her luck painting her room, a medical company recommended its device for her ear infection, and a DJ told her to check out his single.
“I dont want random people contacting me,” said Gard, 21, who lives in Clearwater, Florida. “Dont try to sell yourself through my Twitter.”
Twitter users post 140-character updates about their lives, making the site a potential goldmine for marketers wanting to know what customers are thinking about. While Twitter Inc. could make money by charging companies to send “tweets” to potential customers, the corporate babble may alienate users, threatening to stem the 18-fold growth in visitors in the past year.
“It is starting to get out of control,” said Christopher Peri, founder of TwittFilter, a Web site that lets users restrict who can follow updates they post to Twitter. “The original value of Twitter is friends talking to friends. When someone says, Im going to pimp this product, its no longer a social media.”
Visitors to Twitter in the U.S. increased to 9.31 million in March, up from 524,000 in the same month last year, according to ComScore Inc. Celebrities and politicians, including President Barack Obama, have embraced the service.
Business Model
For now, the San Francisco-based company lets consumers and businesses use the service for free. The site is only starting to generate revenue. Twitter has raised more than $50 million from investors, including Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos, Benchmark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners.
As Twitter grows, companies are increasingly interested in reaching its users — a group seen as less likely to respond to traditional advertising. Dunkin Donuts Inc. answers customer questions on Twitter, Best Buy Co. encourages its employees to use the site, and Hewlett-Packard Co. has about 50 people tracking Twitter every day.
While these approaches may not be intrusive, some companies are using the service to send spam and unsolicited marketing — a problem Twitter is taking steps to fix. The company disabled a feature this month that allowed users to automatically “follow” people who follow them. Spammers used this feature to quickly set up mass networks.
Fighting Spam
Twitter also has a spam team developing ways to detect and delete spam, co-founder Biz Stone said. Users can already block people from sending them messages.
Twitter gets some revenue from Microsoft Corp., which sponsors a site that carries Tweets from executives. While Twitter hasnt said how it will make money apart from that, the company has indicated that it may charge businesses for access to its users. There are numerous outside programs, such as TwitterTroll and Tweefind, that companies use to comb the site for references to their products.
For now, spam isnt a crippling problem, said Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forrester Research Inc. Businesses efforts to tap Twitter are a sign of the services success, he said.
“I dont necessarily see it as a bad thing,” Owyang said. “They cant stop it. Its a sign that theyre becoming more mainstream.”
Red Pinstripes
Gard, who was planning to paint her bedroom gray with red pinstripes, posted an update April 1 telling her friends that she needed to shop for paint at Home Depot, Lowes or Ace Hardware. Within 15 minutes, Home Depot sent Gard a message on Twitter wishing her luck and telling her to let them know if she needed help.
Days later, when she complained about an ear infection, she got a message from Eardoc, which sells a device for treating ear ailments. The company sent Gard a message saying, “Fast and safe relief for ear infection is Eardoc.”
“I was like, What?” Gard said. “I was really confused. I didnt even know businesses did that.”