The Future of Twitter: Social CRM
Twitter has multiple business models to choose from — I get asked over and over: “How do you think Twitter will monetize? What's their business model?” While it's clear their already experimenting with ‘house’ ads, ads that promote features of their service …
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter's rapid growth and rising mainstream profile have intensified a debate already reflected in January coverage of its possible business model and earlier proposals that users pay for the service. The company is also experimenting with house ads while expanding hiring around search and platform APIs.
The Salesforce.com customer-service application gives that API strategy a concrete enterprise use: brands can handle complaints voiced on Twitter from within a CRM workflow, rather than treating the service solely as a consumer publishing venue.
First-order effects
- Salesforce.com users gain a Twitter-based customer-service channel for responding to complaints, bringing brand interactions on the network into a managed support workflow.
- Twitter's search and platform APIs become more important to enterprise software partners, alongside its own advertising experiments.
Second-order effects
- Brands using Salesforce.com have an incentive to monitor Twitter as a service channel, increasing the value of timely search and response tools around public customer posts.
- CRM vendors and other business-software partners face pressure to make external social conversations actionable inside their products rather than leaving them in standalone web services.
Third-order effects
- If enterprise integrations proliferate, Twitter's commercial position shifts toward being infrastructure for customer interaction as well as a destination for consumer attention.
- The broader monetization question becomes whether platform access and business workflows can complement advertising, rather than relying on a single revenue mechanism.
The trend: Consumer social networks are beginning to seek business value through API-based workflow integrations, with customer service providing an early proving ground.