Everyone and his dog has a suggestion on how to monetise twitter…so heres mine.Affiliate links… the amount of links that get posted every day to websites like amazon, play, iTunes and other stores, all twitter has to do is rewrite the url (within a tiny url clone) to add there own aff id to the end and they’d be making a mint!
Infact thinking about it… that would make a big dent in affiliate marketing, twitter is usually the “last click” to a product, just the sheer amount of clicks and traffic would be enough to make them (dare I say it) a “super affiliate” and that way they wouldn’t have to charge people like dell for using the service, they could just take a cut of dells earnings (which last year were over a million from twitter alone).
People will umm and arr about it but the only real complains would be people who are using twitter for affiliate marketing already, noone else will be affected and I think people would rather see something like this than having a set monthly fee for each user (or god forbid, pay per tweet).
I don’t think it will happen to be honest but I do think its a good idea, personally I can see premium accounts coming with SMS enabled (in the uk again) and special features like analytics and pretty graphs.
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I think it would be business suicide.
To use another example, imagine the fuss if Mozilla Corp. started rewriting links to affiliate links in Firefox – it still wouldn’t technically affect the end users….
You’re right: Twitter will ruin affiliate marketing. This is because grown up adults, who should be growing their affiliate marketing businesses, are spending half the day updating their Twitters to update people on what type of spaghetti they ate and which Big Brother celebrity they saw walking down the street.
Oli firefox plugins do it all the time, I honestly don’t see it as much as a problem.
Nadeem depends how you use it, my affiliate activity has def. increased since I started using twitter
I think it’s more about developing a following that trusts you. If you’re posting interesting links and getting click through’s, then dropping in an affiliate link can generate some traffic. But weather the time spent on ‘twittering’ will provide a measurable ROI remains to be seen.