Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have totally transformed the way people interact with family and friends, shop for goods, and do just about anything on a daily basis. Marketing and advertising firms still have some catching up to do.
Pay with a Tweet, recognizing the ridiculously untapped social marketing power of Twitter, offers musicians, publishers, independent authors, and others an easy way to give away their product in exchange for virality. In other words, if a user tweets about (or likes via Facebook) the client’s album or work, the user receives the work at no cost.
In today's world the value of people talking about your product is sometimes higher than the money you would get for it. ‘Pay with a Tweet’ is the first social payment system, where people pay with the value of their social network.
It’s simple, every time somebody pays with a tweet, he or she tells all their friends about the product. Boom.
The “social payment software” is the brainchild of Leif Abraham and Christian Behrendt, who operate Innovative Thunder, a New York City-based team working on creative marketing in the digital world.
When Pay with a Tweet launched in mid-June of this year, its creators also released a book called Oh My God What Happened and What Should I Do? to both paint a picture of marketing in the digital world and to demonstrate the power of their simple software. After two months, 240,000 people had visited the book website and, of those, 113,000 people had downloaded the book.
In a conversation with co-creator Leif Abraham, we learned that (overall) clients have created over 5,000 Pay with a Tweet buttons and more than 300,000 users have clicked those buttons to receive content for free.
Though musicians and publishers can’t make any money through the Pay with a Tweet system, Abraham says he encourages clients to offer customers the opportunity to pay with “regular money.”
Abraham and Behrendt’s book, for example, is available through a couple retailers, including Amazon.
One might wonder who would possibly pay actual money for a product, be it music or a book, if they could just tweet for nothing and get the same product. Well, fair or not, artists have already been struggling with that question for a few years now, ever since p2p sharing sites started making it incredibly easy to download albums or books quickly and for free. While this new tool doesn’t exactly solve the problem of how to make money on the Internet, it definitely provides a fluid way of getting your name out there.
As for how Pay with a Tweet will make money, Abraham’s not concerned about that at the moment.
“Right now we are focusing on taking the service onto the next stage. We think when you have the best product, money will come automatically, even if not directly. But the service will stay free forever.”
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Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests.
Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.
Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes.
We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.
There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.
In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet.
At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.
Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.
What's next for Twitter?
We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users.
We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.
