Yesterday, Twitter announced its newest play for makin some bank – “Early Bird.” It’s simple – follow @earlybird on Twitter and you get updates on limited-time, exclusive offers from Twitter advertisers.
It’s a smart play. And, it’s a sensible opportunity for advertisers; one that rewards the community. In fact, in my opinion, this makes a heck of a lot more sense than sponsored tweets and trends.
As an active Twitterer, I’m actually excited about this. It’s a little “Woot-ish.” And that’s a good thing. If they do this the way users are likely expecting (at the time of this post, they already have well over 15,000 followers – with just ONE tweet), then it has all the right pieces and parts. It’s community driven. It’s exclusive. It’s limited- time. And, on the advertiser side, they have control over the deals and access to a passionate community.
At least at first thought, the only way I see this flopping is if Twitter takes on crappy offers. But, they are asking for ideas for how they decide on offers.
Read more:
- Twitter.com – FAQ on Early Bird
- InformationWeek.com – Twitter Launches Early Bird Ads
- PCWorld – Twitter Takes You Shopping
- PCMagazine – Twitter Launches Ad-Supported ‘Earlybird’ Deals Site
- New York Times (blog) - Twitter Gets Into E-Commerce
As of today, I’m one of the thousands of followers looking forward to seeing where this goes …
