Need a little Twitter help?

by Denise on October 29, 2009

twitter-bird-logoToday I met with a favorite client (OK, you’re all my favorite! No, really!!) and he is a little slow to jump on the twitter bandwagon, even though I am doing my darndest to convince him that it should be part of our overall marketing strategy (He’s analytical so I have to back my twitter-love with facts – ugh). He posed the question : “How does twitter make money?”.  My first thought was “who cares?” but I didn’t say that – I said…”Ummmmmm”.  Well – I found out they don’t make money. Not any. zero. zilch. Suddenly I feel better about my measley paychecks….it all goes into the biz, right?

On Twitter’s About Us page (as to the question: How does Twitter make money?)

Twitter has many appealing opportunities for generating revenue but we are holding off on implementation for now because we don’t want to distract ourselves from the more important work at hand which is to create a compelling service and great user experience for millions of people around the world. While our business model is in a research phase, we spend more money than we make.

They’ve gone through five rounds of VC funding – the last one netting $100 million. Although the number is unofficial, valuations of Twitter went wild and quickly rose to $1 billion. Here are some eye popping stats from PEDC (Private Equity Data Center):

1. According to PEDC’s numbers, the price of a single share of Twitter has increased by 239,619%, from a measly $0.00667 per share to a much stronger $15.9824.

2. Twitter’s $100 million round is over 1025 times the amount of money they raised in its very first round of funding. In July of 2007, Twitter raised $97,500.

3. In five rounds of funding, Twitter has raised an estimated $153 million (some peg it a few million dollars higher). Since the day of its initial round of funding, Twitter has been given an average of $187,356 per day by its investors.

4. Using that same time frame and its current $1 billion valuation, Twitter’s worth has grown by $1,223,990 per day. If you start with the day of Twitter’s inception (the first tweet <http://twitter.com/jack/status/20> from Twitter’s Inventor and Chairman, Jack Dorsey), then Twitter’s worth has grown by around $772,797 per day.

5. Twitter has yet to make a single cent in profit. We’ll let you be the judge of what that means. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

(copied from a post by Ben Parr, dated October 4th, 2009: http://mashable.com/2009/10/04/twitter-stats/)

WOW!!

This all got me searching around for various Twidbits….Found some great useful links for us Tweet-a-Holics (I have begun thinking in 140 characters or less. I tweet inside my head. I’m losing my #mind!!!)

  • 140it – Makes Your Tweet Less Than 140 Characters
  • Tweetcontd – More than 140 characters
  • Twonvert – Convert your tweets to 140 characters or less
  • Twitlonger – When 140 characters just isn’t enough
  • Tweetshrink – Helping shave those few extra letters off a tweet that has exceeded the 140 character maximum
  • TwitBlogs – Allows you to add more words and also upload pictures and videos


Backgrounds and Buttons

Browser Plugins

  • TwitterFox - TwitterFox is a Firefox extension that notifies you of your friends’ status on Twitter
  • TwitterBar - Post to Twitter from your address bar
  • Power Twitter – Makes Twitter better
  • TwitterLine - Twitter headline extension for Firefox
  • Twitter Search – Twitter search
  • StockTwits - Links stocktwits tagged ticker on Twitter back to StockTwits
  • Twitzer - Lets you post text longer than 140 characters on Twitter
  • TwitterJobSearch - The world’s first job search engine to harness the power of Twitter
  • Feedly - Feedly weaves your favorite content into a fun, magazine-like start page
  • Instant Tweets – Instantly send pages, pictures and tweets to Twitter from any where on the web
  • Tweecious - Listening to your twitter feed and submitting all the links to your delicious account
  • TwitKit - TwitKit is a Twitter sidebar
  • TwittIE - Make your Internet Explorer tweet
  • Twitbin - Allows you to keep up with all of your Twitter conversations right from your browser sidebar
  • DashBlog - Lets you collect videos, images, text, songs and screenshots from any web page and publish them to your blog or twitter
  • Social Whale Extension – Create short URLs for use on Twitter
  • shortText - Twitzer is a Firefox extension which lets you post text longer than 140 characters
  • TwitThat - Post current page to Twitter via twitthat.com
  • Song.ly – Lets you share music links on Twitter
  • TwittyTunes - Allows to post your currently playing songs to Twitter
  • Tweetstalk - The simple way to stalk Twitter users without having to follow them
  • Yoono - Yoono simplifies your social life by centralising all your social networks and instant messaging in one easy to use browser sidebar
  • Twippera - Twitter widget for Opera

Business

  • CoTweet - Designed for businesses using Twitter to engage existing customers and attract new ones
  • ComTweets - Twitter + business
  • twtQpon - Create Twitter coupons for your business
  • Twtvite - A simple event manager twitter app
  • Twitzu - Promote your events on Twitter
  • TweetManager - Twitter app for complete Twitter automation

Clouds

Dating and Love

  • Flirt140 - Flirt140 is a site that helps Twitter-ers find each other for dates and more
  • MyTweetHeart - Twitter singles looking for friendship, romance, and love
  • Radaroo - The simple and free Twitter dating system
  • Twitcrush - Which three tweeple do you <3 the most
  • Textgasm - Twitter secrets
  • PornstarTweet - Stay up to date with your favourite pornstars

Desktop & Web Clients

  • Tweetdeck - TweetDeck connects you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook and more
  • Seesmic Desktop– Desktop client connecting you to Twitter and Facebook
  • Destroy Twitter– DestroyTwitter is a compact though robust Twitter application built to run on Mac, Windows, and Linux
  • Twhirl - Twhirl is a social software desktop client
  • Chirpr - Windows sidebar gadget for Twitter
  • Accessible Twitter – Web accessibility for the Twitter web application
  • Pwytter - Multi-platform Twitter client written in Python
  • Mixero - The new generation Twitter client for people who value their time and are tired of information noise
  • Snitter - A Twitter client for Mac and Windows
  • TweetMyPC - TweetMyPC lets you shutdown/restart/LogOff your windows PC remotely
  • Posty - Posty simplifies your microblogging
  • Sideline - Watch, search and monitor the Twitter public timeline in real-time
  • Twitexplorer - The most efficient Twitter client on the Web
  • Nambu - Social messaging streamlined
  • Tweetie for Mac – Twitter client for Mac
  • Teletwitter - Twitter client for Windows
  • Digsby - Digsby is a social networking tool that alerts you of events like new messages
  • Twitteroo - Send Twitter tweets fromyour PC
  • Twinja - A desktop client Twitter built on AIR
  • Tweeter - A java desktop client for Twitter
  • Gwibber - Gwibber is an open source microblogging client for GNOME
  • TwInbox - Use Twitter directly from Outlook
  • MadTwitter - Twitter for Windows
  • Spaz - An open-source Twitter client for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux
  • Twitteron - A robust, easy to use, free twitter client for all operating systems
  • Tweetr - Twitter client for Mac / PC
  • Twittm - Twitter for desktop
  • Jata - Just another Twitter app
  • Spreadtweet - IT’s Twitter disguised as a spreadsheet
  • Blu - The Vista Twitter client
  • bDule - Twitter client for Windows
  • Statuzer - Twitter client running through Air

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