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."

Comments

Twitter for twits?

[Paleolibertarian]

Sorry. I couldn't resist!

And twitter makes...?

[JorDan Clock]

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?

Re:And twitter makes...?

[mwvdlee]

It's web 2.0.
Who cares about profits?

I'm one of those @Outlet buyers

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Doesn't really justify Twitter.

[owlnation]

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.

Re:Doesn't really justify Twitter.

[krinderlin]

In the most recent issue of Time Magazine, the cover story is all about Twitter and what it is. I really enjoy this quote from the article:

For as long as we've had the Internet in our homes, critics have bemoaned the demise of shared national experiences, like moon landings and "Who Shot J.R." cliff hangers—the folkloric American living room, all of us signing off in unison with Walter Cronkite, shattered into a million isolation booths. But watch a live mass-media event with Twitter open on your laptop and you'll see that the futurists had it wrong. We still have national events, but now when we have them, we're actually having a genuine, public conversation with a group that extends far beyond our nuclear family and our next-door neighbors. Some of that conversation is juvenile, of course, just as it was in our living room when we heckled Richard Nixon's Checkers speech. But some of it is moving, witty, observant, subversive.

Steven Johnson.. How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live. TIME. June 15, 2009. Pg 35

I remember doing exactly this while watching the recent inauguration while tracking #obama and a few other hashtags in my TweetDeck. I had one of those moments, that I hope all people involved in the development and leverage of technology, where I was just in awe of what I saw.

Twitter is not a new idea, and it will probably not last very long. I saw it likened to IRC elsewhere on this thread. It is, in a way. However, instead of IRC with several channels, we just send all the messages together and allow the user to filter them however they see fit. Furthermore, this filtering gives a whole new way to find someone talking about a topic right now.

Another moment I like to talk about is when I posted to Twitter how I was going over to a close friend's house. He had asked me to bring over a bottle of Vodka. Not two minutes later, I got an @ reply from Pinnacle Vodka, saying that they hoped it was good news and to try out their brand of vodka. I picked up a few shots of it on my way out the door at the liquor store. I appreciate that sort of relevant advertising. Obviously, I was looking for a bottle of vodka right then and I received a suggestion for a particular brand. I like it far better than Facebook reminding me that my profile says I'm single by flashing single's dating sites all over it's pages for me.

To be fair, there are horror stories. My friend posted that she was going to go on a diet. Afterward, she suddenly had 40 new followers. All of them were accounts with 2 to 3 tweets with links to various diet plans. Twitter has since removed all 40 accounts, as she diligently reported all of them for spamming. Twitter still has some work to do to differentiate itself as a viable, highly targeted, and powerful advertising medium.

Twitter has changed the game both for the users and the advertisers, and I think it's for the better. Twitter may be gone in 4 years, but the rules they've changed will probably persist in this form for some time beyond that.

Social fad? Possibly. Game changer? Definitely. That's the point of Twitter.

List.

[Kamineko]

A simple of list of timely, valid coupons leads to increased sales. Who'd have thought it?

An admission of guilt?

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Twitter IS a good marketing tool

[FooBarWidget]

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.

Re:Twitter IS a good marketing tool

[FooBarWidget]

There already is a support forum. There already is a bug tracker. Why do you think I still take the time to search Twitter for feedback?

It usually goes like this. Somebody posts a complaint about Twitter, something like "Software XXX sucks, it says 'YYY', WTF?"
These people are obviously too frustrated to take the time to ask something on the support forum. So instead of waiting for them to file a bug, I actively help them by providing a solution, or by asking them for more information. 9 out of 10 times they respond positively with more details. These are all feedback that we would never have gathered using just the support forum and the bug tracker.

The fact that you mentioned the 140 characters limit already shows that you are totally missing the point. It is not the technology that matters, it's the social aspect. The 140 characters limit is irrelevant.

What exactly is twitter?

[V50]

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?

Re:How do they plan to charge businesses?

[c_forq]

I don't know if I agree. Twitter is kind of odd, its not like facebook or e-mail. It is as personal as a text message, yet as easily to ignore as a blog. It is also great to see not only what is going on in the world, but what people think about what is going on. This shows there is definitely value for twitter, and like you I agree they can't charge for commercial tweets, but I think there are many other options for them to make money (most likely through premium services, maybe allow longer posts at 5c an additional character, or more a more customizable profile for X dollars, or maybe customer leads based on their user data).

Re:How does this bolster anything?

[thetoadwarrior]

That may have been 3 million in sales they wouldn't have had otherwise and setting up a twitter account is free so I don't see how it's a bad thing.

0.004%

[nacturation]

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