Twitter begins business pitch

 

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By Reuters

Posted on 27 Jul 2009 at 09:36

Twitter is planning a marketing campaign aimed at educating businesses on how they can make money from the microblogging service.

The plans comes as Twitter begins to look at earning revenue from the service, which has enjoyed spectacular growth over the last year.

Eventually, the company is hoping to push out a range of paid-for services to businesses including account certification and analysis tools, though it could also generate revenue through data user.

First, however, it needs to ensure that business are using the service and understand how it can help them. To that end, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says the campaign will seek to reposition Twitter as a communication network, rather than a social network.

"We started out by creating this very simple status updating system. And that's not what Twitter is. It evolved into something else," says Stone.

He also dismissed rumours of a possible acquisition by Google: "We have ongoing discussions with a lot of companies. One of the ways we look at Twitter, and the landscape in general, is not as a zero-sum game but how we can reduce a lot of friction between a lot of companies," adds stone.

"In other words, we see ourselves as complementary to big social networks, to search engines, to big commercial sites."

Stone says Twitter is in it for "the long haul" and is creating a company culture and doing other things internally that "you just don't do if you're interested in being acquired."