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Dell Makes $3 Million From Twitter Sales
Barence writes "Dell has admitted to raking in over $3 million from advertising its products on Twitter. The PC maker has been using Twitter for two years, and employs proprietary software to track sales from users clicking through from Twitter links. Of that $3 million, the company claims that $1 million was made in the past six months, following an explosion in Twitter's popularity. (Here is an analysis indicating that 72.5% of Twitter users joined in 2009.) The majority of sales have come through the @DellOutlet account, which posts six to ten special offers a week — with at least half of these being Twitter exclusives. Though the $3 million is a drop in the bucket given Dell's $12.3 billion in revenue during the first quarter of this year, it further bolsters Twitter's case for charging businesses."
Sorry. I couldn't resist!
Alright, so Dell makes $3 million; But how much does Twitter make from Dell's @DellOutlet account? And how much revenue does Twitter make in general?
I always knew it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Let me clue you in. People that shop at the outlet are cheap bastards. We scour the web for dell coupons, and then buy second hand stuff to save a couple of bucks. We couldn't care less were we have to scour for that information.. Dell should just save us the trouble and put the information here www.dell.com/coupons. In fact Twitter should pay Dell for driving the traffic to Twitter.
So what? Dell has effective marketing people. Why is this news?
They are simply milking an overhyped communication medium, one where there are doubtless many easily influenced and gullible users -- their gullibility being the reason they are using Twitter in the first place.
Twitter made nothing from this. Twitter makes nothing at all -- other than an enormous amount of hot air. Sure, companies like Dell should ride the gravy train while it's still on the tracks, but it won't last. just like it didn't with Myspace, AOL, Facebook etc, etc, etc...
And if anything else, the more companies using Twitter to market themselves the even less cool and useful Twitter will be to the few who use it. It will die faster.
They are still bleeding more users than they retain, this kind of thing will only make it worse.
Charging businesses as a way of monetizing twitter just doesn't make sense. First, how do you determine just who exactly is a business. Do you only include Dell right alongside mom and pop stores? Secondly the only reason the Dell is raking in the cash is because it offers exclusive deals, which it happens to put on twitter. If they did the same thing on FaceBook, or any other platform, I imagine they would have similar results.
A Magic the Gathering Article and Forum Aggregator
So basically, Dell made 0,024% of all its sales from Twitter. Yeah, what a colossal success Twitter seems to be for businesses. Posting AC because I don't feel like taking a hit from the web 2.0 crowd tonight.
A simple of list of timely, valid coupons leads to increased sales. Who'd have thought it?
"Dell has admitted to raking in over $3 million from advertising its products on Twitter."
"Admitted"? What a curious choice of words, almost as if there were something wrong with a business making money! So Dell found a new way to boost sales. Good for them! I'm sure their stockholders appreciate the effort, even if /. doesn't.
As a software development company, we regularly use Twitter to see what people think of our software and try to improve it based on the feedback on Twitter. Twitter has also been a tremendous help in spreading our news announcements throughout the community. The business value is huge.
Each time I'm baffled by how Slashdotters totally miss the point of Twitter, and try to paint it off as a useless website with no substance. It isn't about whether blogs/mailing lists/email/etc are better communication tools.
$3 million in revenue from Twitter in the last two years, versus what I count as roughly $100 billion in revenue over the past two years for Dell. That's not enough to qualify as a drop in the bucket. If I were Dell, I would laugh in Twitter's face if they demanded money-- they'd probably generate just as many sales by slipping fliers under people's windshields in parking lots.
How much is twitter making from all this free advertising?
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
Despite all this talk of Twitter, I still haven't figured out what, if anything, Twitter actually is. The two main descriptions that keep recurring are:
A reimplementation of IRC over HTML and
A site where people talk about how great Twitter is, and occasionally panic over current events
Does that pretty much sum Twitter for non, uh, twits up?
"...and employs proprietary software to track sales from users clicking through from Twitter links."
Wow, knowing which link someone clicked on to get to your site? That sounds magical!
and employs proprietary software to track sales from users clicking through from Twitter links
Seems like its only purpose is to invoke an anti-Dell sentiment by linking them to evil proprietary software.
But let's look at the numbers. $1 million over the last six months. That's an average of $500K per quarter. Dell made $12.3 billion in revenue for the first quarter. So Twitter sales represent about 0.004% of their sales. OMG AMAZING TWITTER IS SO EFFECTIVE!!1!1
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Also consider that if the article is correct, Dell is doing this advertising completely within the Twitter rules and even the twitter mission. These are small, informative ads that are visible only to parties who have opted in. If Dell was spam creating users and following them as a way to push information to users, that would be different.
Adding a paid service for some place like Dell would just muddy the waters. It would only lead to feature creep.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."