It’s been said the early bird gets the worm – so hats off to Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb for being the first to tip us off to yet another advertising revenue source for Twitter. Coming to a Twitterstream near you, get ready to fish where the fishes are – as a new account called ‘Early Bird’ or @earlybird is going to open for business shortly (excuse my mixed metaphor)!
Still a secured account with only 259 followers as of this posting (all of which I’m assuming have signed up since Kirkpatrick’s article "Twitter to Publish Shopping Deals Through @earlybird Account" was published on July 2. (UPDATE: As of July 11, @earlybird has over 30K followers).
Carolyn PennerWhile Twitter has not yet provided us with an official announcement, Kirkpatrick was able to make contact with Carolyn Penner, one of Twitter PR folks (recently hired from Google) who teased him with the following response: "There are interesting things in store for @earlybird. Keep waking up early and you might be the first to find out what they are."
Since Dell Computers was the number one success story on Twitter garnering over $6.5 million in sales over the course of two years, Twitter has finally woken up to the realization that the goose that lays the golden eggs doesn’t have to give all those eggs away any more (My post from a year ago on June 13, 2009 reported on 4 other companies in addition to Dell who were savvy enough to secure lucrative revenues from the Twitterstream -see "Top Five Giants Stealing Twitter’s Golden Eggs")
With Twitter’s Sponsored Tweets and Sponsored Trends both launched, there is not a lot of feedback as to how successful either advertising vehicle has become for the microblogging platform – but speculation is high that they are both virtual goldmines.
Now with an actual account to follow that "by its name" implies "special discounts" and "special deals" for Twitter users – you can be assured that once it catches on, it will be attracting ‘new’ members to the site while it earns lucrative advertising revenue off of each and every sale. Kirkpatrick is speculating that "EarlyBirdElectronic," "EarlyBirdBooks" or "EarlyBirdMusic" could be some of the ‘vertical’ markets that Twitter will be establishing to build followers according to product preference.
So it looks like Twitter is finally going to be finally holding on to some of those golden eggs for itself, while offering some of the worms for its users. See you in the early AM.
Update – July 9 – Twitter blog
